[OT] What are D's values?

[Guillaume Piolat]

On Monday, 4 October 2021 at 22:15:33 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>
> What are your experiences with this?

Pretty much.

At a superficial level D is a language that says "yes" to most 
things.
Can I have that feature? Yes.
Can I move this piece of code there? Yes.
Can I reuse that C/C++ code? Yes, you can.

So that's the "liberal" part, the low mental-friction that makes 
you do things.
Bounds check and variable initializaton participate in that, 
since you win precious time.

Because the first task of any software is to exist and be useful, 
at a reasonable cost.
And that's great because that's where most program need to stop, 
as garbage internal tools or experiments. So D has attracted a 
lot of lonewolves types - for better and worse - and it shapes 
the culture.

The other parts are the restrictions, you can add qualifiers to 
increase quality, and the language will gently remind you that 
safety is important. D strives to strike a balance for 
large-scale wasteland programming. It is the mature C++ that 
depart from the "MAX POWER" ethos to give instead actionnable 
power that you don't come to regret later. Some features you 
really appreciated in a hellish maintenance context.

So D strikes me as a thing of balance, its values are somewhat 
"bring your own values" and of course the marketing message isn't 
hitting as hard and fast as imbalanced languages.