6 replies to this topic

[john]

I used to hear lots about how 'D' is evolving and is the best programming language around..and that it even beats C# and Java.

I just realized that most of the people who used to use 'D' now moved to C#.
Anyone know what happened?

[davepermen]

c# is stable (and in version 2.9 has about all the features i care about), it compiles fast, runs quite fast, and has a huge, great library.

there is simply much more man-power behind it, wich is the reason why i haven't found any bug yet in it.. no language design bugs really, no compiler bugs, no runtime bugs.. quite .... wow :D

and the ide rocks. the 2005 beta's are the best ide's ever made imho. fast, small, efficient, dynamic. when coding c#, you type about 10% of the code you generate.. thanks to intellisence. really designed for an efficient workflow.


i still follow D, but i don't like some of the more advanced language features. it looks more like a "uh, lets add this, too, and see what happens" right now.

but there are things i'll always love, like the array slicing design, very efficient, and clean.

and the small and fast compiler rocks, too..

i think, for me, D died the moment templates went in..

[Michael]

davepermen said:

...when coding c#, you type about 10% of the code you generate.. thanks to intellisence. really designed for an efficient workflow.

This of course suggests the question why the language itself isn't designed for an efficient workflow. I.e., couldn't the language be sufficiently expressive that the boilerplate code which has no additional meaning could just be omitted?

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i still follow D, but i don't like some of the more advanced language features. it looks more like a "uh, lets add this, too, and see what happens" right now.

That was about my impression as well.

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i think, for me, D died the moment templates went in..

How so?

[Mihail121]

I found it pretty bad that 'D' didn't gain much popularity but indeed the potential of that language is great! Compiler is small, portable and extremely fast!

Same with Free Pascal. Sall, portable, functional and fast. But the community remains is quite small.

Why is it so? Is C# and the gang really so cool? I don't think so...

edit:

forgot to say that although it's in beta state, the FP IDE looks quite promising. Yes, yes i know it looks just like the old DOS EDIT program but it's in fact quite functional and stable. Ok, the code-complete feature has some minor errors...

[fyhuang]

I think it might have been bad timing, and bad luck. C# is in one of Microsoft's products. Therefore people started using it. D may have been introduced when people weren't looking for a better language, and when C++ was just enough. I didn't follow it at its conception, but it may have sparked the current slew of new languages.

That's just my opinion anyways...

[Marian]

Michael said:

davepermen said:

...when coding c#, you type about 10% of the code you generate.. thanks to intellisence. really designed for an efficient workflow.

This of course suggests the question why the language itself isn't designed for an efficient workflow. I.e., couldn't the language be sufficiently expressive that the boilerplate code which has no additional meaning could just be omitted?

I wouldn't say that. It is always good to use for long meaningful identifiers in your programs so that you will be able to maintain your code in the future. Still, you don't want to type them and you expect that the IDE does that for you.
I prefer Java and that's why I love CodeGuide, because it does that very well. I hardly wait the cross-language version of it (X-develop).


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Marian

[davepermen]

words are always much more representative than characters. thus a good language, and good written code, should use words, where appropriate.

the IDE should be able to care about a fast mapping from as less as possible characters, to the only possible words in the context. thats what an intellisence does.

c# is a great language to write fast, 100% working intellisence routines that handle this mapping in a great way.

the language itself does not have to care about what an identifier is. it should care about being logical, rather simple, and still flexible. when moving back from c# to c++ you realise so much that c++ just has because it borrowed from c, and there, just because it was needed back in those days.

one is the declaration/definition thingy. gets _REALLY_ annoying once moving back from c#... there you can code everything independent, and even have it in independent dlls without any issue. that rocks.

D was a simple language, too, but it messed up :( too bad.. now i just need some bindings of c# to softwire :D