On Monday, March 05, 2018 11:38:05 Atila Neves via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: > I used to use `immutable`, but gradually came around to only > using it if I have to send data to another thread, otherwise it's > too much of a hassle.
Aside from the whole std.concurrency situation, I generally use immutable in the places where the semantics are the same as const, so it doesn't generally cause a problem for me. I just prefer immutable in the cases where it and const are the same, because immutable clearly indicates that the value never changes, so immutable more closely fits the idea even if const happens to mean that in that particular case. I agree that using immutable where you have to do stuff like design objects in a particular way in order to make immutable work is generally too much of a pain to be worth it, but at least in those cases, the data can then be shared across threads, and it's data that doesn't need mutable backdoors, because it only makes sense to use immutable in that fashion when the object is really designed to never change state. I think that the only time that I've programmed heavily in a way that involves immutability everywhere is when I programmed in Haskell, and that combined with the fact that Haskell is lazy and completely functional such that you can't use imperative idioms anywhere made it so that each line of Haskell code took me more time to write than is the case with any other language I've used (except maybe batch, because of how insanely error-prone it is). I think that I'm a better programmer for it, but I'd hate to program that way normally, and using immutable all over the place would head too heavily in that direction - though at least D, unlike Haskell, is a multi-paradigm language and allows you to choose to use a particular idiom when you think it makes the most sense instead of forcing it everywhere. - Jonathan M Davis
