On Friday, 27 March 2015 at 06:49:05 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Friday, 27 March 2015 at 04:05:30 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
Programming is - for now - still a human activity, and what is
important in human activities may not always be measured, and
what may be easily measured is not always important. That
doesn't mean one should throw away the profiler and go back to
guessing, but it does suggest caution about adopting the
prestigious techniques of the natural sciences and applying
them to a domain where they don't necessarily fully belong.
What is almost always important is:
1. to be able to ship the product in a predictable fashion
2. not go 300-400% over budget
3. being able to train new people to maintain it in reasonable
time
4. being able to add new unexpected features to the code base
on request
Perl is a very expressive and productive language. And you can
write maintainable software in it if you have discipline. In
the real world Perl tends to lead to an unmaintainable mess
with the average programmer.
Fair points that I wouldn't argue with (although I think
predicting when one will finish something entirely new is a mugs
game - another reason to favour prototyping and rapid iteration
when possible).
But those strike me as practical questions of commercial
experience, judgement, and tradecraft, and I don't see what it
has to do with D or with a scientific approach, except that D may
have some advantages in some cases in these areas. I don't see
any essential resemblance whatsoever between D and Perl - on the
contrary.
The data points we have suggest that the scarcity of D
programmers is an imaginary problem, because enterprises just
hire good people and they pick it up (ask Don at Sociomantic or
Dicebot for example). Modern business has a misplaced emphasis
on credentials. And if you have a large code base it is not like
a new guy can just dive in, anyway. There is a signalling effect
at work also, at least for the time being.
I am curious about something, if I might ask. You seem like you
feel let down by something about D. Ie you give various reasons
but I am not sure that's the motivating factor. What's behind
that ? No need to answer if you prefer not to, of course.
Laeeth.
