On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 05:06:48 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
wrote:
On Wed, 14 Aug 2013 22:56:30 +0200
"Andre Artus" <andre.ar...@gmail.com> wrote:
A relatively small number of people are attracted to tools and
languages that don't have broad exposure. These people are
marked by dogged determinism and a high tolerance for [mental]
pain. Your average Joe or Jane is not like that, they have
something they want to achieve and if they perceive the
language/tools are working against them they will try
something else.
FWIW, I'm sold on D specifically *because* I have very little
patience
for tools that feel like they're working against me.
Totally with Nick on this one. I liked C/C++ specifically because
of the generic programming aspect + static typing. Then I learned
that D did it better. Then I switched for my personal projects
(all recently).
== A self-case-study regarding SO
The conversion started after I read this post on SO:
http://stackoverflow.com/a/3560395/1467466
That... was shocking in simplicity. Shocking enough for me to
play the what if game for a few minutes. It meant that someone
could move a lot of functionality and hackery that build tools
perform into the language and make it 'purdy. I *like* my code,
including build tool, looking 'purdy. Or even 'purrrrrdy.
Looking at it now, that demo is a code snippet. It demos *the
code* and the constructs and how pretty it looks. The bullet
point answer above it, the accepted one, didn't catch my eyes. It
was just a list of features. I mean, yeah, CTFE was exciting, but
the code snippet demonstrating how succinct it all was... THAT
WAS EYE CATCHING.
IT. WAS. 'PURDY.
D's flippin' awesome, I can implement functionality like C++'s
'bind' function in 40 lines while the Boost library has to do in
hundreds of lines (for compatibility, BUT STILL), I can deal with
arbitrary tuples in a sane way, mixin arbitrary strings, I'm not
constantly reaching down with my pointer finger to the less-than
sign while my left hand is occupied with shift or scrunching my
right pinky against the shift while my right middle is trying to
hit the greater-than sign... D is just -pleasant-.
I'm enjoying all of this now *because* I was tipped off on D's
awesomeness... by StackOverflow.
On the flip-side, here's 'nother tidbit (I saw this crazy thing
before the post above):
http://stackoverflow.com/a/7303196/1467466
Yeah, sure, it's impressive, but there's no code snippet. There's
no demo of how the code was *written*. C++ also has
Turing-complete metaprogramming, whoopdeedoo. My only experience
at that point with metaprogramming had been torturous for
anything more than a little complicated; what else could I have
expected of this clearly masochistic individual's code? "Nothing
new here, moving along..." was my thinking there. The post above
it had snippets, but was kind of long and I didn't feel like
diving too deep when I didn't yet care much for the language.
== The long and short of it:
I'm only one data point, but I'm still a data point. :-P
I understand that, really, er'rything should be for knowledge's
sake, but, if it isn't too much effort, please answer Qs while
strutting D's prettiness on SO.
Massive, massive kudos to whoever's had the patience to answer
newbie questions, as unclear as they may have been sometimes
(such as my own).
== And the obligatory...
HI FIRST TIME POSTING. Just yell at me if I get too obnoxious and
whatnot.
