On Sunday, 24 May 2015 at 21:35:13 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
On Sunday, 24 May 2015 at 20:36:47 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
Without wishing to dwell on the negatives of alternatives,
might I ask what made you decide to settle on D? Do you have
collaborators who write code and, if so, how did the
discussions with them go about this? For your use case, what
have been the main gains you have seen and how long did it
take before these started to come through?
I'm not weaselcat, but I'm an academic and I also tried out
Rust before using D. I came to the conclusion that there was no
way I could ever expect any collaborator to use Rust. The
syntax was crazy. The requirement to study memory management
issues (something completely irrelevant) before even reading
the code was a non-starter. It's just a complicated language
that is not suited for the average programmer.
D is different. As long as I avoid templates, it's easy to read
the code I've written, without any experience with the
language. I tried C++ (Dirk Eddelbuettel devoted a section of
his Rcpp book to an example I contributed), Rust, and Go. The
other realistic alternative was Go, but I chose D as a matter
of personal preference.
This is an often underestimated aspect. Code that looks clean and
pretty makes programming much more enjoyable and thus boosts
productivity. If a language is not nice to look at, it puts
people off. Not only because it makes code less readable, it is
also aesthetically off-putting, which is purely psychological,
but real nonetheless. D is quite clean for the most part and you
can easily discern the "shape" of a program (even people who've
never used D, can make sense of it by looking at it). If a
language like Rust introduces convoluted syntax for even the
simplest tasks, then it will put people off, both in an aesthetic
sense and as far as understanding the code is concerned (not to
mention all the typing!). I think this is one of the reasons
Python took off. It's nice to look at.
With Go I have the sinking feeling that it won't be able to
contend with C++ - or D for that matter. It took off due to
Google and a fool-proof, easy-to-use infrastructure. But it is
way too limited and limiting to be useful for more sophisticated
tasks. Go's core devs even say that they wanted it to be an
easy-to-use, middle-of-the-road language for those who work in
their code mines, focusing on a high output, and it doesn't
matter, if you have to write the same function or for-loop with
slight modifications over and over and over again.
Nim looks interesting, though. It combines nice features with
Python's cleanliness. It is just this type of language people at
universities and "coders-by-accident" love. Ha ha ha.
