On Wednesday, 11 May 2022 at 05:41:35 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
What are you stuck at? What was the most difficult features to understand? etc.
No singular feature, but the overall cognitive load if you use the language sporadic. Which could be most users that don't use it for work or have it as their main hobby.
As with all languages, cognitive load increases when things do not work as one would intuitively expect or if a feature is incomplete in some specific case. D has some of the same issues as C++, you either deal with details or you can choose to go more minimalistic in your usage.
If you read other people's D code you can easily (IMO) see that there is no unified style or usage of features, so it seems like people stick to their own understanding of «good code», which can make it tiresome to read D code by others (e.g. standard library). I guess some good coherent educational material is missing, people are finding their own way. There are no obvious codebases that highlight «best practice». I suspect meta-programming is pushed too much and that this has a negative effect on legibility of code bases.
You basically increase the cognitive load further if you choose to be slightly different from other languages, and focus on special cases. Examples: the proposal for interpolated strings, dip1000, certain aspects of D's generics syntax etc.
When you already have high cognitive load you should be very careful about not adding more "slightly unusual/unexpected" semantics/syntax.
To make it more meaningful, what is your experience with other languages?
I believe what makes Python a favoured language by many is that you can use it sporadically without relearning. Spending less time reading documentation is always a win.
To do things right in C++ you have to look things up all the time, this is only ok for people who use it many hours every week.
In general I think the ergonomics would be much better if the historical baggage from C/C++ had been pushed aside in favour of a more intuitive clean approach. I am not sure if many new users have a good understanding of C/C++ anyway.
Of course, this perspective is highly irrelevant as it is clear now that the current direction of language evolution is to continue to absorb C and not really be provide a clean improvement over C, but more like an extension. (More like C++ and Objective-C than Rust).
I think it will be difficult to attract young programmers with this approach as they are less likely to be comfortable with the peculiarities of C.
