On Friday, 29 December 2017 at 17:29:47 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
On Friday, 29 December 2017 at 07:53:51 UTC, IM wrote:
-- Better compiler errors, better compiler errors, better
compiler errors.
This is the only thing I greatly care about anymore. Biggest
problem D has in real world use.
Please allow me to give an example of how first impressions of
maturity really matter! Recently at some company, a group of
engineers started advocating for using Rust. They wrote a doc
explaining the differences and benefits of Rust over C++ (which
is heavily used). People started experimenting, and immediately
the maturity and good user experience of rustc and cargo were
quite obvious. The result was that Rust is now more appealing,
some new projects were written in Rust, some old ones have or are
being migrated from C++ to Rust.
(**This is a real story by the way**)
Now, given the fact that I love D despite some of the annoying
issues I encounter with it frequently, I would like to call my
colleagues to give it a try and experiment with it. People start
getting interested. They start writing some code, and eventually
they hit one of those unhelpful compile error messages, which
could indicate one of the following:
- An error in the engineer's knowledge of the language which the
compiler didn't help to understand what it is so that s/he goes
to look it up.
- A bug in Phobos.
- An actual compiler bug or inconsistency.
Remember, those engineers are experimenting with D to use it for
serious projects at work, not personal toy projects. What do you
think? Is it likely that they decide to invest a lot of time and
resources migrating projects to D?
Maturity (or at least approaching it as much as possible) is VERY
VERY VERY important.
I like what the D foundation did to the website, the language and
library docs, the Learn section, the forums, the resources ...
etc. That definitely gives the impression of maturity.
Looking forward to seeing more of that in the compiler, which is
the single most important thing in a programming language, the
reason it exists, the thing I interface with most of the time.
