dsimcha wrote:
To me a fair assessment of whether a complex feature belongs in a language is
the
following:
Given the target audience, will the average person save more time by using the
new
feature than he/she spends learning it?
Not a bad definition.
The assumption here is that you will have to learn most or all of the features
of
your language of choice, because you will have to understand other people's
code.
D2 is a complex language, but it's not complex in a haphazard way. It's
complex
because it statically proves stuff about your code (const, etc), and allows
extremely powerful, generic user-defined types. These are the kinds of things
that most people only dream about.
Any fool can design something complicated. Genius is in finding the
underlying simplicity. For example, in C++, function overloading is done
with a very complicated set of rules and a mass of special cases. But
C++ function template overloading is done with one simple rule: partial
ordering. C++ couldn't go back and fix function overloading, but D can.
D overloads both functions and function templates with partial ordering,
which is a simple rule that gives results equal to or better than the
complex rules.
