On Wednesday, 22 August 2018 at 13:17:00 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 03:57:10 UTC, John Carter wrote:
* Choice. ie. Programmers _want_ to use it, not are
constrained to use it.
* For programming activity, not new projects. ie. The era of
vast tracts of green field programming is long gone. We're
mostly in the era tinker toys and tidying.
That's a matter of choice, some are tidying, but there's a lot
of green field programming even in C, and new languages are all
green fields.
I suspect if you actually lean of the shoulder of the vast
majority programmers earning their daily bread, they aren't
writing a brand new program... they enhancing, and fixing an
existing one.
There is a big difference between "Doing a lot of" and "Being
Good at".
That's why you can't be tidying all the time, you can improve,
but can't become good this way.
Oh, I would argue it's the best way. Or this wouldn't be funny....
http://bonkersworld.net/building-software
By tidying I mean refactoring legacy code that is way too
large and complex to rewrite all at once.
Nobody is going to deep refactoring; example: C/C++ (well, you
mention them too) and pretty much everything. And it's that
large because it accumulated garbage and rewrite will cut it to
a manageable size; example: s2n (fun fact: it's written in C,
but uses slices for safety just like D).
Whenever I see a rewrite which claims it has made things so
wondrously simpler / better, closer inspection reveals it does
wondrously less, and supports wondrously less legacy cruft.
Thus I do not believe these "experiments" have isolated the
effect deleting unneeded or little used features and support for
legacy platforms, vs the effect of rewriting vs refactoring.
Nobody is going to deep refactoring
That I believe could be the paradigm shifting advantage of D.
Every time I have written a refactoring or code analysis tool for
C or C++, the preprocessor has amplified the complexity of my
task by orders of magnitude.
And every transformation I might propose.... it is incredibly
hard to guarantee that it is safe and behaviour preserving, a
sentiment echo'd by every optimization pass writer for C/C++.
