On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 20:49:33 UTC, Maxim Fomin wrote:
On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 18:48:18 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Andrei and I had a fun discussion last night about this
question. The idea was which features in D are redundant
and/or do not add significant value?
A couple already agreed upon ones are typedef and the cfloat,
cdouble and creal types.
What's your list?
I guess the underlying problem is inability to formulate the
target state of the language with specified relations between
different components. Being looking at the language since late
2011 I found problematic to know the language as a whole. When
a newcomer looks for information he either gets a common
overview "native efficiency, ..." at dlang.org with (outdated)
documentation or videos on youtube which explains how
scope(xxx) beats exceptions and templates are superior to that
in C++ and similar posts in the web, let alone toolchain lack
complaints.
My comment was provoked mainly by
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/[email protected]
discussion (D3 idea).
You ask which features are redundant or not significant, but
this depends on how features are integrated in the rest of
language and without clear and completed vision there is no
answer. And please remember, that each of D member has its own
(biased) information about D and what to do. The language is
moving and it is hard to reveal how any change will affect
other components. Even if you found a particular item redundant
there is no guarantee that the situation will not change in
future.
Currently I (who looked for a language that combines C#
"usability" and C performance) view D as a ship which sails in
unknown direction with lots of holes (look at bugzilla
proposals how to make a language) and what I found the most
dreaded is that the direction of the ship movement today is
determined by which hole was fixed yesterday.
So, you are free to ask ship's crew about what hole and how to
fix and expect that it will tomorrow bring ship to a better
place, but without final destination this brownian movement may
theoretically last infinitely, but of course, in practice it
will lead either to ship crashing, departure of sailors or
finally targeting an unexpected place with unsatisfactory
result.
That's a very well worded post. That's one more reason why the
most important thing imho is to have the current feature set
stabilized, and not adding or removing features every other
month, because we don't have enough experience with D to be
certain such feature is redundant. This kind of experience can
only be gained with feedback from hundreds or thousands of users,
and there aren't that many users in this newsgroup.
D is large enough that I'm pretty sure no two programmers use the
same features. That's why we have so different answers to the
question "which features is useless ?". Yet every programmer has
his favorite feature that saves his ass at one point or another,
and that's why everybody finds it's a joy to use. Were it
missing, someone would complain. I'm pretty confident that in a
sufficiently large program, nearly every single feature of the
language will be put to good use.
Now what people don't like is when features or Phobos don't work
as expected, I suppose that's what you call holes. And that's
another matter. I've browsed through hundreds of bug reports last
week, and I could see many many features don't work as expected.
And that's the most important problem in my opinion. That's where
most of the efforts should be put.
