On 04/28/2017 06:11 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
That's the thing about C++: The right way is the obscure way, and the
straightforward way is the wrong way. And yesterday's right way is
today's wrong way. And apparently (it would seem), the only way NOT to
completely fuck *everything* up is to become an expert on every corner
of the language, and STAY an expert on all the latest changes. In the
immortal words (and voice) of Duke Nukem: "What a mess!"
Yep, this always reminds me of:
https://bartoszmilewski.com/2013/09/19/edward-chands/
That is *awesome*!
Although, I always saw Eddie Scissors as more of a retelling of
Frankenstein.
D is not without its own flaws and WAT-worthy dark corners, mind you,
but in spite it its warts, I still prefer D any day over the masochistic
labyrinth of 99 wrong ways to do the same thing (and only 1 "right" way
-- until next year) that is C++.
Yea, I really think it's more important than many of us realize to heed
Herb Sutter's warning and not allow too much worrying about backwards
compatibility thus leading D down the same path. When I see people here
fret over "Yea, but it may cause breakage", on one hand I understand
that can be the responsible stance, but OTOH it also makes me cringe
because it's one more "cat" nibbling us to death - I don't want to see
it follow in C++'s footsteps and allow these unfixed mistakes build up
and damage what made D great in the first place. Especially since "small
things that add up to more than the sum of their parts" is a big part of
what makes D good in the first place.
The latest WAT I found in D is this one, see if you can figure it out:
How an alternation between two character types ends up being int is
beyond me, but even more inscrutible is why ch : wch produces int but
wch : dch produces uint.
Ouch. Although yea, guess that's another good reason to just decide
Unicode == UTF-8 and be done with it ;) (I don't even care about UTF-8's
supposed bloat in eastern alphabets - it's freaking *text* either way.
Tale of Genji would be what, some tens of MB in UTF-8? Bah, trim down a
few images and overengineered file formats and multimedia clutter if you
need a shave a few measly MB so badly. If UTF-32'd won out, the complete
works of Shakespeare would in the same boat, some tens of MB in the
"wrong" format and we *still* wouldn't have the ASCII-simplicity of code
points being equal to graphemes anyway. It's *text*. If your software's
footprint or bandwidth is dominated by the size of a bloated text
format, then *congratulations*, you officially have one of the smallest,
most succinct software footprints in the world, so smile and be happy!)
