[OT] What are D's values?

[Tejas]

On Thursday, 7 October 2021 at 21:59:26 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:

>
> Speaking for myself only here:
>
> (1) I have very little concern about walking less travelled 
> paths; IME popularity does not correlate with quality. 
> Javascript is one of the most popular languages out there, but 
> from a design perspective it's trash. No real OO, you fake it 
> with prototypes (or whatever it is they call 'em), fragile 
> error handling, tons of WATs (== vs ===, weird implicit 
> conversions between strings, integers, floats, etc.), debugging 
> is a royal pain.[*]  The only reason JS is still afloat is 
> because its disproportionate popularity draws in enough 
> manpower to barrel through problems.  On the contrary, 
> better-designed languages tend to be the less popular ones.

Yeah JS is a royal pain, but now TS has become a true 
alternative. The shops that are stuck with JS for some reason are 
stuck with it; but I think we should now compare with TS if we 
will ever talk about web stuff, since practically all new 
projects start with TS now.

>
> (2) I have all the tooling I need for efficient work with D 
> (vim +
> compiler + Unix shell == yeahhh).  Though I understand I'm in 
> the far
> minority on this point. :-D

Same here :D
>
> (3) Breaking changes with each release happens not just with D. 
> I have some very old C++ projects dating from the 90's, and I 
> can tell you that trying to get them to compile with a modern 
> compiler is an exercise in pain.  The only reason people don't 
> complain about this very much is because D releases much more 
> frequently than C++.  Janky workarounds for C++ code are pretty 
> much so widely-accepted that you don't even think twice, you 
> just insert const casts everywhere, insert compiler switches to 
> suppress errors/warnings, use macro hacks to patch over stuff 
> just for Mt Cesuaga (Making That Compile Error Shut Up And Go 
> Away), etc.. By comparison, D workarounds are a walk in the 
> park.

I think C++ has more robust backwards compatibility. The latest 
(mainstream) C++ compiler(s) can easily compile code written in 
2010. But I doubt the latest D compilers can do so.

Sure, it might get painful if we go 20 years behind, but C++ is 
still better in that department, in D you can't even imagine 
having that degree of support(yet, hopefully).

>
> (4) Ideological constraints: I find D the most liberating in 
> this respect, actually. Javascript forces you to fake things 
> like OO with its weird backwards prototype-based ideology, Java 
> constrains you to shoehorn the most unlikely things into 
> OO-sanctioned constructs, and both Java and C# force you to 
> endure a watered-down generics system because full-on 
> template-style generics are considered "too dangerous" for the 
> unwashed masses to consume (don't even get me start on Go, 
> which doesn't even have generics), leading to boilerplate 
> galore; functional languages force you to rephrase the simplest 
> of imperative constructs in a functional guise, etc..  With D, 
> I can choose the best paradigm for the problem at hand without 
> needing to pay lip service to some ideological ideal that 
> doesn't actually map well to the problem domain. OO when I need 
> OO, functional when I need functional, bare pointers and asm 
> for when I need to go under the hood to solder wires together, 
> so to speak.
>

Yeah, but you don't think that could lead to inconsistencies? 
Like the other languages are subscribed to a specific paradigm so 
certain constructs might appear unnatural, but atleast they might 
be _consistently_ unnatural? I hope our flexibility doesn't 
result in `perl` style only-I-can-read-my-code, but actually goes 
closer to `python`'s there-should-be-only-one-way-to-do-it.


> Of course, that's not to say D doesn't have its own set of 
> problems. But in comparison with the other languages I've 
> experienced so far, D has the least of the problems in exchange 
> for the most of the benefits.
>
>
> //
>
> ([*] Once, I had the misfortune of having a complex, 
> ill-maintained JS project dumped on my lap at work. Most bugs 
> in that code manifested themselves in a blank page with no 
> other traces of the problem.  The browser's debug console was 
> useless because somebody "helpfully" installed an exception 
> catcher that deliberately swallows errors. Worse yet, one of 
> our support targets at the time was IE6, which did NOT have a 
> debug console at all. It was a lot of "fun" debugging problems 
> specific to IE.  JS is indeed the epitome of a popular language 
> with better tooling and greater stability.\</sarcasm>)

Eeeek D: