On Saturday, 23 June 2018 at 09:41:19 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
Man, proggit can be savage with the criticism. Every Nim/Rust
and the one Ada programmer have come out of the woodwork to
make sure you know their language supports nested functions.
You've seemingly got to be an expert in every current language
to write a comparison article that suggests D may have some
advantages.
I've read the criticisms about the choice of the alternative
language on the Reddit page, and I think that most of them are
finally quite unfair.
In my programming career, I've already used many strongly-typed
languages (C, C++, C#, Java, D, Go, Rust, Nim, Crystal, Julia,
Pascal, etc) for at least one professional or personal project,
and I'm also convinced that D is a good alternative to EP,
especially compared to C++, Go and Rust for instance.
Where I disagree with Bastiaan is on the rejection of the
Pascal language itself, as there are other open-source Pascal
compilers (GNU Pascal in EP mode) which could have been used
and enhanced to match the company requirements, while
preserving the company future for the decades to come.
IMHO, implementing a EP-to-D source code converter was probably
more risky than simply extending an existing Pascal Compiler in
that case.
Like everybody here, I hope that Bastiaan efforts will pay in
the long term, but I'm not as optimistic as many here that this
will end as a success story, as I'm not sure that his teammates
will really enjoy working the automatically generated D code as
much as on the original source code...
Yes but their job is to make boats floating (like said Veelo at
Dconf 2017, not writing compilers. Pascal lags behind and not a
few, in term of expressiveness.
Also transpilation of Pascal to something else is simple because
no semantic is needed.
