On Saturday, 22 April 2017 at 17:17:46 UTC, Vasudev Ram wrote:
On Saturday, 22 April 2017 at 08:30:03 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
On Fri, 2017-04-21 at 17:20 +0000, Vasudev Ram via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
Hi list,
I hope the question is self-evident from the message subject.
If not, it means: what are D developers generally called (to
indicate that they develop in D)? The question occurred to me
somehow while browsing some D posts on the forums just now.
DLanger? DLangist? D'er? Doer? :)
I tend to favor DLanger, FWIW.
I would hope none of these, but as ketmar said "programmer".
There is none, probably just D programmer. Maybe the D community
isn't big enough yet.
Terms such as Pythonista, Rubyist, Rustacean, Gopher, etc. are
terms of tribalism and exclusion. They are attempts to ensure
people claiming membership of the tribe reject being polyglot
by pressuring them to eschew all other languages.
I think you are over-generalizing, and don't fully agree.
Definitely, some people may use those terms in that manner and
for that reason. Boo to them :)
By definition, you are creating such a term to include some
people and exclude others. Often it creates tribes full of
groupthink, like Russel says, but it doesn't have to, like you
say.
I'm never in favor of such pressuring, exclusion or whatever.
And BTW I know what I am talking about, having seen some of it
in real life, one example being in the Ruby world. I did Ruby
commercially for a while, learned it even before Rails was
created or became popular. And I frequented the Ruby message
boards and blogs for a while, and participated in them. Saw a
lot of what you describe, others have written about it too. A
good amount ofjuvenile and one-up-manship behavior. That is one
reason why I moved to Python (apart from liking it after using
it some). The community tended to me more mature and
engineering-oriented, rather than like the Ruby people, many of
whom were hackish and gloated over having done some cool stuff
with Ruby "magic" or monkey-patching (which often results in
hard-to-find bugs - cool for experimenting, bad for production
use). As far as being polyglot is concerned, I'm quite in favor
of that too, and would never dream of even suggesting, let
alone pressuring, people to "eschew all other languages", as
you put it (this is the point about which I don't agree and
think you are over-generalizing). In fact, I do training too,
and once, a student who was taking a Python course from me, was
talking about his goals (he works in another field and is
trying to get into development). As part of that, he mentioned
wanting "to become a good programmer (Python)" - at which point
I immediately replied to him, that his goal should not be to
become a good _Python_ programmer, per se, but to become a good
_programmer_, period, because there is much more to programming
than one or even many languages - databases, use of libraries,
software design, testing, debugging, use of source control and
other tools, naming conventions, other programming conventions
and style, etc. Mentioned books like Code Complete to him - as
a great resource on those lines.
And I'm a polyglot programmer myself, having worked on BASIC
(learnt on home computers), Pascal, C, Java, Informix 4GL. Done
real commercial work in all of those, apart from the same in
both Ruby and Python. And even keep dabbling in new languages
now and then. That's how I came across D, for example, which I
like a lot - IIRC it was by reading some article in a computer
magazine, could have been Dr. Dobbs.
A good programmer can work professionally with a number of
languages, the psychology of programming people have data
supporting this theory – if the languages have different
computational models.
Totally agreed.
Thus I would claim to be a programmer currently working with D
for the project I am working on just now, with SCons/Python
for the build system. In a while it will be C++ on another
project with CMake. Later still it will be C and Meson on a
different project. Further on it will be Kotlin and Frege
using Gradle for yet another project.
Same here. Language agnostic. It's the best way. Another
anecdote - once, in a company where I worked and was managing a
product team, I had a need to write a small reminder utility
for my own use. The project was in C++ and Java (I worked on
the Java side), but since I knew Python and it was a good fit
for the tool, I did it in Python - in a few minutes. One of my
team members wanted to do it too, so, since he only knew Java,
when I told him I was doing it in Python and it would be done
very fast, he smiled and said "I'll do it in Java" - and
proceeded take more time than I did for the same functionality.
Nor was there any performance or other requirement that
necessitated Java - he did it because it was the only language
he knew. "Use the right tool for the job" and all that ...
You're rambling here. :)
We don't have a name for ourselves, it's not a bad question if we
should. It's tough to form anything from D alone, another reason
the short name sucks for a new language. Of course, C, C# and
C++ have the same problem. ;)
Maybe we should wait till the community gets larger and see what
evolves, if anything.
