That's what she said!
On a more serious note it's cool to see the languages creator quite frequently on HN - it is the reason I took a look at it a while ago :)
Why I Like D
41–50 of 134 posts
Re: Why I Like D
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
D doesn't have evangelists or a marketing team. It's just people who find it really useful.
Quoted post unavailable.
Someone else made a really good point about hype today: 'One of the dumbest lessons I’ve learned in my career is that you should never disregard something that has hype behind it, even if you don’t think the tech makes sense. [0] Most “tech adoption” problems are really human coordination problems. Hype solves those. It doesn’t matter if you have a better solution, or that you think the proposed solution is stupid. [1]'
[0]: https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/14809742688758743... [1]: https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/14809747831814348...
Re: Why I Like D
#43Yes, I just wished more people liked D so it got momentum.
I wanted to like D because I respect Walter a lot, and D's community probably has by far the highest SNR of any community I've visited... seriously smart people.
But the language just wasn't for me. Right off the bat, the default import style which thrusts everything exported into the default namespace like C seems odd at this point. Apparently one can use what are called static imports, but as a code reader I can't enforce it.
It feels a lot like a language for C(++) folks, who IMO tend to be more conservative and entrenched.
Given the initial paragraph, maybe I'm just not smart enough to grok it :).
Re: Why I Like D
#44According to wikipedia: "...was originally released under a custom license, qualifying as source available but not conforming to the open source definition. In 2014..." Which has been a different path other more popular languages took to increase popularity. The standard D2, which is now D, introduced breaking changes and stabilization only came around 2010. Parallel to this, other programming languages became more p…
I originally underestimated the value of Open Source, which was definitely a mistake. Now I do everything in Open Source. The latest was releasing my disassembler, originally written in 1982, under a Boost License. (It may be old, but it disassembles the latest Intel instruction sets.)
It's now part of the dmd D compiler. Just throw the -vasm switch, and it'll display the generated code on the console.
I see many uses for a freely available disassembler. For example, you can add it to your favorite text editor! Admit it, you've always wanted to disassemble your text.
https://github.com/dlang/dmd/blob/master/src/dmd/backend/dis...
Re: Why I Like D
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still wondering why don't people like D more after all these years it's been there.
Probabaly lack of killer application. If you released super popular whatever (game engine, embedded platform, 3d design software) that uses D as its customization language suddenly a lot more people would have a good reason to learn D.
Which is amusing because the compatibility means a lot of customization would just be written in C.
Re: Why I Like D
#46> For example you cannot have multiple inheritance of classes (only of interfaces) so you cannot fall into the diamond problem like in C++ or Java.
This is a weird thing to call out java for: you cannot inherit from multiple classes there. You can only get a diamond if you inherit two interfaces with default implementations of a method on a shared parent interface. Over a decade of writing java, I hit this zero times. In any case, Java treats it as a compile error and forces explicit resolution instead of silently doing something confusing.
Re: Why I Like D
#47That's what she said! On a more serious note it's cool to see the languages creator quite frequently on HN - it is the reason I took a look at it a while ago :)
The D test suite takes too long to run, so I wind up here.
Re: Why I Like D
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it RESF, or is it Rust's unique feature of memory safety (and data race safety) without GC? D is a nice language to be sure, but it's going to have trouble matching these features. Of course, this is not meant as a criticism of D - other languages like Jai are practically in the same boat. The C++ folks are at least aware of the challenge, as is clear from the C++ Core Guidelines effort.
Rust definitely has a lot of merits. I was definitely following it, and excited by its release. But you cannot deny the RESF was obnoxious. And pervasive. But ultimately successful - the people who voiced their dislike would get down-voted to oblivion.
The anti-Rust stuff was/is pretty tiresome too. FWIW, I think disagreements about the choices Rust made make plenty of sense, or even the disagreements re: its style. But that wasn't what most of the anti-Rust stuff was/is -- it was/is just resentment regarding the hype of a thing, which is just the worst sort of criticism.
Re: Why I Like D
#49According to wikipedia: "...was originally released under a custom license, qualifying as source available but not conforming to the open source definition. In 2014..." Which has been a different path other more popular languages took to increase popularity. The standard D2, which is now D, introduced breaking changes and stabilization only came around 2010. Parallel to this, other programming languages became more p…
I originally underestimated the value of Open Source, which was definitely a mistake. Now I do everything in Open Source. The latest was releasing my disassembler, originally written in 1982, under a Boost License. (It may be old, but it disassembles the latest Intel instruction sets.) It's now part of the dmd D compiler. Just throw the -vasm switch, and it'll display the generated code on the console. I see many use…
> I originally underestimated the value of Open Source, which was definitely a mistake. Now I do everything in Open Source.
Humble comment. It is very good to hear this. Will guard this for future examples.
Re: Why I Like D
#50Yes, I just wished more people liked D so it got momentum.
I wanted to like D because I respect Walter a lot, and D's community probably has by far the highest SNR of any community I've visited... seriously smart people. But the language just wasn't for me. Right off the bat, the default import style which thrusts everything exported into the default namespace like C seems odd at this point. Apparently one can use what are called static imports, but as a code reader I can't…
Wow, and someone else just yesterday was giving D credit for not thrusting everything into the global name space like C does!
Yes, two different D modules can declare the same name as public, and they will not conflict with each other.