On Friday, 22 November 2013 at 14:11:50 UTC, bearophile wrote:
Chris wrote:
E.g. one day D might implement features that have to do with
what Facebook needs more than features that programmers need
in general. So a module std.webshite.upload.latest.picture
gets all the attention while std.reallyhandy is being
neglected.
Do you know one or two cases where this phenomenon has happened
to a language?
Bye,
bearophile
Good question! To be honest I cannot put my finger on any module
of any language in particular. Maybe Objective-C would be an
example where sometimes things would advance at breakneck pace in
Cocoa, while some handy features in the standard Objective-C
library (e.g. in NSString) would still be missing (but that's
years ago now, I haven't used it for a while, so I dunno how it
has developed).
Java is a good example of how (corporate) ideology (and
management) ruins things. Everything is a class, if you don't
want this, you create a class and declare static functions to
turn off OOP. Well, ... You can see that people are trying to
redefine Java, to come up with a better Java. Why is that?
Because there is a committee that decides and won't have any
criticism. So people say "Hold on, this is not really
practicable, let's try something else!", and D already is the
something else. What attracts me to D (among other things) is its
practical approach.
Go is web-oriented, so it seems, and I'm sure it will be marketed
as the "one size fits all" solution for web development,
multi-core and whatnot. But D goes deeper. D raises fundamental
questions about how a good program should look like, what is good
/ practicable. I know that this approach doesn't sell, but it's
the best I've ever come across. D makes you think and re-assess
your own code time and again.
