Feedback on Átila's Vision for D

[Guillaume Piolat]

On Friday, 18 October 2019 at 13:54:19 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Fri, 2019-10-18 at 13:35 +0000, Guillaume Piolat via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Friday, 18 October 2019 at 11:36:45 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> > But how does D scale?
>> > 
>> 
>> I'm glad you asked!
>> Your question is not very specific ("scales") but let's try.
>
> How does any programming language scale? It doesn't, it's just 
> a programming language.
>
> If we take scale to mean able to be as easily used by 200 
> programmers on a 10,000,000 line codebase as as 1 programmer on 
> a 100 line codebase, then generally no-one has any idea, and 
> certainly no data. For any language. The whole scaling argument 
> regarding codebases is usually vacuous philosophising. Most 
> teams use a programming language and then find out how to use 
> it for big codebases as for little ones when their little 
> codebase becomes a big one. cf. FORTRAN, Fortran, C++, COBOL, 
> Go, Rust, Lisp, SML, etc.

Where is no data or conclusive evidence, there are some anecdotes.
- some people with large python codebases, even full-time, tend 
to tell me that dynamic types don't "scale" that well past 10 kLOC
- some problems reveal themselves "at scale". For example in a 
C++ constructor you can leave a filed uninitialized. I've once 2 
weeks on such a bug that cascaded in a complicated system.  D has 
.init and would have avoided that.
- Java seems to scale exceptionally well thanks to a culture of 
reuse and comparably simple language
I don't think it's all in our heads that some language are more 
conducive to "scale", whatever that means.