On 2015-02-08 17:57, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Ehm. This part sounds unnecessarily a bit political - NIH syndrome, closemindedness of the D folks toward using anything else but D and make, and such.
I'm just sharing my experience since I've tried this before. I would not recommend using any other language than D unless it has the community's blessing. I'm just trying to save him the trouble.
I do remember one action I took "against" Ruby - replacing a 109 line Ruby installer script with 13 lines of makefile code: https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/installer/pull/10/files. It would be difficult to construct an argument against that work.
I specially remember you saying something along the lines that it took me two years to consider D instead of Ruby for Orbit.
Ruby and Python have all my respect as an outsider of their respective communities: they have users who enjoy them and get work done using them. That's always a good thing in my book. That said, I wouldn't feel easy appealing to Ruby or Python for D internal work for reasons that I consider entirely practical and non-political: * One more language for the maintainers to know and use.
Same thing with make or shell scripts.
* One more dependency. Although scripting languages are ubiquitous enough, I can tell from direct experience that versioning and dependent packages can be quite a hassle.
Only for building the tool. The scripting language would be built-in to the executable.
* Escaping into a high-level language seems as much "cheating" as escaping into a low-level language. If C or C++ would be needed instead of D for a task, it is worthwhile exploring how to make D a better replacement for them . This has been historically a good and important goal to pursue. Similarly I'd rather explore what it takes to expand D into high-level territory instead of escaping into a high-level language.
It's just that the syntax Ruby has, in my opinion, is better suited for a declarative DSL, i.e. call methods without parentheses, blocks/trailing delegates, top level execution of code.
-- /Jacob Carlborg
