On Monday, 21 January 2013 at 07:20:59 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
On Monday, January 21, 2013 02:01:42 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
D does continue to face an uphill battle for mindshare: These
days,
most people who write code prefer to use languages that accept
ANY
grammatically-correct code and deliberately remain silent
about all
mechanically-checkable problems they can possibly ignore.
Apparently
this is because they prefer to manually write extra unittests
so that
only a subset of these errors are actually guaranteed to get
caught
(if there's any guarantee at all).
In my experience, most programmers don't want to write unit
tests, so I
suspect that the folks who are pushing for less strict
languages generally
aren't testing their code any better than the folks using
strict languages
are. I suspect that the main problem with folks wanting the
compiler to just
accept stuff is that too many of those folks started with
scripting languages
where you don't have compilation errors, because you don't
compile anything.
- Jonathan M Davis
If the goal is to increase the popularity of D, and if people
prefer scripted languages over compiled, then a good place to
start is to create an interpreter for D, thus allowing it to be
used as a scripted language, and also retain the ability to be
compiled for optimal performance.
This will _not_ cheapen D, it will strengthen it, because I can
see plenty of serious programmers using the interpreter for
faster coding. Later the code can be compiled once the job is
done or needs to be tested in compiled form. There are also
perfectly sane use cases for having the ability to embed an
interpreter directly into an application.
If we can determine what will help move D towards greater
adoption, and then prioritize what needs to be done to make it
happen, then we'll move forward faster than just randomly bumping
around.
--rt
