A betterC base

[Fra Mecca]

On Friday, 9 February 2018 at 01:55:10 UTC, Benny wrote:

> Plenty of "general purpose" programming languages. The issue 
> being that very few offer classes, no GC, easy syntax, good 
> tooling and editor support, ...
>
> [...]
>
> D, D never changes ( fallout reference ).

Hi Benny,
I have read both of your lengthy post and given your harsh 
criticism I decided to reply to you, even though I think in such 
cases that it's better to let the flame burn out by itself.

I totally respect your choice of using Go and your problem of 
usability on Windows.
On the other hand, I have yet to encounter the other issues you 
have mentioned (I don't want to belittle your considerations).

When I approached D, one year last august, I was instantly amazed 
by what I consider a clear and solid design.
What I appreciate as well is the bazaar style of development. I 
think it is worth it in the  long run because it allows D to take 
different directions that the ones original envisioned. One such 
example is the take on backend programming (vibe and the other 
frameworks). Go, Elm and Java (but many others) on the other end 
suffer because their "dictators" are  slow or against some 
paradigms (generics and structured programming are on example).

BetterC may seem an half effort that may split the development, 
but going in the past the D community is full of attempts that in 
the end succeeded.
The documentation is an example of that, or the way recently the 
@nogc story is evolving rapidly.

> D is so tiring. Its the main reason for going with Go, simply 
> tired of waiting. In this one+ year time watching D, i have 
> seen blogs, betterC half finished being promoted when D is 
> already overloaded with features and has already a higher 
> learning curve.

I think the very opposite.
D for me come as intuitive as possible. With just a solid 
background on C and python I was able to understand the most 
important design decisions and write software more complex than 
before and build abstractions (Go goes in the opposite way).
Even reading code written by other seems easily accomplishable 
(something impossible for me in C++) and many design decisions 
don't seem half-assed attempts at innovate (like asyncio in 
Python).

I don't think that any of the abstractions of the std library or 
the idioms of the language add bloat and it seems to me that I 
can learn each one of them day after day without losing any 
sanity.

> Everything feels so 90% finished, like the effort to finalyse 
> things is always lacking. You see it everywhere in D. That is 
> my view... disagree, fine but it does not change the outside 
> perception of D. D needs a massive cleanup, a focus, probably a 
> name change to get rid of the reputation...

That is my personal experience and I think that if you can be 
more specific and tackle some definite issues you may help this 
community.