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D as a Better C

dlang.org

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Re: D as a Better C

#91

Post by christophilus »

logicallee wrote: post #62
christophilus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. It should have been in that list, actually. I wanted to like Go. It seems simple (which is what I like so much about Clojure), but honestly, I found it to be frustrating for all the standard reasons the Go team is tired of hearing (e.g. no generics, error handling littering my code and obscuring intent, etc). In fact, I think Go doesn't quite deserve the reputation it has as being a simple language. It's a fami…

EDIT: this is getting downvotes for some reason even though it's just addressed to OP. OP, you could email me at the link on my profile if you didn't want to answer here. I'm not on the Go team or anything, just curious. --- Thanks for your answers! So I know you don't want to rehash what's easy to find elsewhere, but your perspective is different because you wrote a Clojure interpreter. It's not the same as what I c…

Well, building an interpreter isn't that difficult. Even less so, if you're building one on top of a good dynamic language (which was the case with Dart in my original list). If you're interested in getting started, these are good intros to the basics:

- http://www.buildyourownlisp.com/

- https://github.com/kanaka/mal

Re: D as a Better C

#93

Post by christophilus »

logicallee wrote: post #62
christophilus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. It should have been in that list, actually. I wanted to like Go. It seems simple (which is what I like so much about Clojure), but honestly, I found it to be frustrating for all the standard reasons the Go team is tired of hearing (e.g. no generics, error handling littering my code and obscuring intent, etc). In fact, I think Go doesn't quite deserve the reputation it has as being a simple language. It's a fami…

EDIT: this is getting downvotes for some reason even though it's just addressed to OP. OP, you could email me at the link on my profile if you didn't want to answer here. I'm not on the Go team or anything, just curious. --- Thanks for your answers! So I know you don't want to rehash what's easy to find elsewhere, but your perspective is different because you wrote a Clojure interpreter. It's not the same as what I c…

[EDIT: I didn't down-vote you, and I appreciate the question.]

Simplicity is not the same as familiarity. It's not the same as a small feature-set, either. Gratuitous Rich Hickey reference for what I mean by simple[1]. So most languages aren't simple by that definition, but I'd say that Go's inconsistencies prevent it from being what I call simple. Some examples:

Instead of having a general mechanism for describing datatypes, they have several one-off, exceptional syntaxes (such as for how you define tyep type of a map).

Go's dependency management / vendoring (or lack thereof) is complexity-inducing, even though it appears simple at the outset.

Sometimes you do things via method (such as `fmt.Println(message)` and sometimes via function (such as `len(message)`).

And so on. Coming from a language like Clojure that is regular, possibly to a fault, Go seemed to be littered with one-offs and inconsistencies.

[1] https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

Re: D as a Better C

#94

Post by christophilus »

logicallee wrote: post #62
christophilus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. It should have been in that list, actually. I wanted to like Go. It seems simple (which is what I like so much about Clojure), but honestly, I found it to be frustrating for all the standard reasons the Go team is tired of hearing (e.g. no generics, error handling littering my code and obscuring intent, etc). In fact, I think Go doesn't quite deserve the reputation it has as being a simple language. It's a fami…

EDIT: this is getting downvotes for some reason even though it's just addressed to OP. OP, you could email me at the link on my profile if you didn't want to answer here. I'm not on the Go team or anything, just curious. --- Thanks for your answers! So I know you don't want to rehash what's easy to find elsewhere, but your perspective is different because you wrote a Clojure interpreter. It's not the same as what I c…

I feel a little bad writing up a full list of what I don't like about Go since I haven't used it enough to be as informed as I should be to write such a list. But... since you asked.

No generics, error-handling obscuring flow of logic, dependency-management, the compiler complains about not-used vars and imports (which is great, except when you're prototyping) it should be togglable, it felt like I was producing a lot of code to do something small (I felt the same about C, but not about e.g. Nim), and then, I think the little oddities I mentioned in my comments on simplicity added up to make me feel like I was building an inelegant solution.

That's off the top of my head. There were possibly other gripes, and I am possibly mis-remembering, so take it all with a grain of salt.

Re: D as a Better C

#95

Post by dbaupp »

StevePerkins wrote: post #41
jacquesm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would hold up Haskell as another counter example to your assertion.

Would you really, though? I can definitely picture some proponents taking enjoyment from their programming language being perceived as inaccessible to the masses. Insofar as it makes them feel more elite for their knowledge of it. But even then, the ego gratification depends on there being a wide audience of people who know "of" the language and its inaccessibility. If people don't know that you're elite, then well..…

Wow! I think you're being extremely uncharitable to SPJ, who I believe expressed the sentiment about Haskell originally.

There's ton of reasons to not wish for adoption. For instance, supporting commercial use of a programming language is a lot of effort and takes a very different shape to pure language/compiler experimentation and research: more software engineering and less computer science.

It is true that the creators probably wish for the product of the research (as in, the successful ideas) to be adopted widely, but that's not the same as wishing for popularity of the framework that proved the ideas. The researchers can focus on their strengths as can commercial compiler/language developers.

Re: D as a Better C

#96

Post by christophilus »

cstrahan wrote: post #86
logicallee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: this is getting downvotes for some reason even though it's just addressed to OP. OP, you could email me at the link on my profile if you didn't want to answer here. I'm not on the Go team or anything, just curious. --- Thanks for your answers! So I know you don't want to rehash what's easy to find elsewhere, but your perspective is different because you wrote a Clojure interpreter. It's not the same as what I c…

I'll let the parent answer you (though I have similar sentiments as someone with language implementation experience, and FWIW, I have professional experience with Go, Ruby, JavaScript, Clojure, C#, and I've used Haskell, F#, and much more in my free time). I will, however, point out that you're likely using a different definition of simple ("easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty. ") than is often used i…

This is a better answer than the one I gave. And is also a good explanation of why leaving Clojure for anything else always feels so icky. :)

Re: D as a Better C

#97

Post by christophilus »

dom96 wrote: post #74
christophilus wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, I don't have any examples off-hand. It was a month ago. I'll see if I can dig the repo back up and reproduce the error. As for how it failed, it did not segfault. It just stopped and dumped me back out on the terminal with no output at all. (I'm on OSX 10.12.6.)

That's a pity. Let me know if you dig it up. Next time please create an issue on GitHub[1], you don't have to worry about creating a small example either, as long as you give us all the code to compile it. 1 - https://github.com/nim-lang/nim

Hey. I appreciate you showing this level of concern. I'll track down that project and open a few issues if I can reproduce it... It may not be until next week, due to traveling and other things coming up.

Re: D as a Better C

#98

Post by TylerE »

christophilus wrote: post #23
logicallee wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nim, Dart, and C as a comparison) Could I ask about your thoughts regarding Go (which has much less syntax and fewer features than all of the above). Have you looked into it?

Yeah. It should have been in that list, actually. I wanted to like Go. It seems simple (which is what I like so much about Clojure), but honestly, I found it to be frustrating for all the standard reasons the Go team is tired of hearing (e.g. no generics, error handling littering my code and obscuring intent, etc). In fact, I think Go doesn't quite deserve the reputation it has as being a simple language. It's a fami…

I sometimes feel Go went to far, as in the classic quote "Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler".

Re: D as a Better C

#99

Post by rifung »

steinuil wrote: post #80
sythe2o0 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been my understanding that Lisp and its relatives aren't designed to compete against C for speed either. Is this wrong?

Common Lisp has some very fast implementations (I think SBCL is the fastest) and it was designed to be a systems language. It can be optimized to be as fast as C.

> It can be optimized to be as fast as C

Sorry if dumb question but how is this possible when it's garbage collected?

Now I really feel like I need to learn a Lisp though.. Is there a certain Lisp you would recommend that's practical enough I'd use it for projects? Racket?

Re: D as a Better C

#100

Post by Keyframe »

pjmlp wrote: post #24
saghm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is a high-level interpreted language, and C/C++ are low-level (even compared to other) compiled languages. While you might be able to optimize your Python code to run faster than it does now, it's never going to match the performance of C/C++, nor is it intended to. Go will be a significant speedup over Python, but likely won't quite match the speed of C/C++ for most tasks. Then again, the ease of development…

You can easily get best of both worlds with Lisp derived languages.

I like Lisp, though Scheme in particular. However, I have no idea where I would turn to in order to write an application with GUI that needs to be cross-platform and, possibly, derive a mobile version for iOS and Android from the same codebase.
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