On Wednesday, 10 June 2015 at 19:57:15 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> Please note, OED (which is the definition of the English language

As Tofu Ninja said, a dictionary only (partly) reflects the current usage of a language. Look up the word "sophisticated" and you'll find out that it had a different meaning in the 1920s. In fact, dictionaries invariably lag behind and as soon as a new version is published it's already out of date.

Also, do not forget that those who create and revise dictionaries are not representative of all speakers. They will typically be part of an elite that defines the language in terms of their own belief system. Most certainly so in Great Britain.

> whatever any USA upstarts may try to pretend)

I shouldn't really comment on this cultural snobbery. However, different linguistic communities have different linguistic realities. The English spoken in the US, Ireland or Scotland is not the same as in England. The linguistic reality for a speaker in Liverpool is not the same as for a speaker in London. But who cares, English is beyond the grasp of Oxford now. You only have yourselves to blame, nobody asked you to go and spread the language all over the globe.

> is gearing up to define
> "they" as both singular and plural, thus at a stroke solving all the
> he/she, she/he, (s)he, it faffing.



> On Wed, 2015-06-10 at 19:05 +0000, via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 10 June 2015 at 18:41:56 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>> > That's actually a good idea, you might not have noticed it, but I rarely use "he" alone as a general term and I notice it when other people do. Little things like this in language can make a difference in people's feelings and cause discomfort in the environment.
>> 
>> Sure, follow your own ethics, but that won't work in an international environment as a rule without coming off as censorship. You cannot force people globally to follow a local culture. I also try to cut down on the term "you" as a general term since people might think I mean them personally.
>> 
>> At some point you just have question intent if there is a misunderstanding, rather than control every expression or else everything becomes "it":
>> 
>> "A bad programmer create bugs when it edits its files...".
>> 
>> And if people force you to write "it", it is quite reasonable to wonder what else they strongly object to so you better just stay silent. I really do try to cut down on the term "you"?

On Wednesday, 10 June 2015 at 18:13:53 UTC, Dave wrote:
> Another backwards annotation is nothrow. I don't really care if something doesn't throw, I care when it throws, because then I have to do
> something (or my program may crash unexpectedly).

I recently debugged such "no crash" bug: the code decided that the program shouldn't crash and caught exception and silenced it, the program indeed didn't crash, but misbehaved. It was a critical bug, which blew into the face of the customer, there was nothing in the log, we had to connect to the customer's database and debugged with catching first chance exceptions. What we should do if we had no access to the customer's database? If the code wouldn't catch the exception, the application would crash and we would have an entry in the log and debugged it quickly. That's how nothrow works in practice.

On Thursday, 11 June 2015 at 09:14:00 UTC, Chris wrote:
> Now, now. It is true that bad and frustrating experience with other languages drove me (and probably others) to D.

Suggesting that a language like D is based on experience in comparison to Go is... not right... given the experienced language designers behind Go.

If experience is key, then Go wins.

> People here often request features you can only ask for after years of programming experience. This shows that there is a lot of experience in the D community. Without experience D wouldn't be where it is, having only limited resources.

Language designers that design more than one language tend to make smaller and tighter languages as they gain design experience and get better at delegating nice-to-have-but-not-essential-features to libraries. Features have a higher cost than initial implementation.

Walter has been more open to feature suggestions than many other designers, and implemented them in a timely fashion, that is true. And that can be both a good thing and a bad thing, but obviously engaging and fun from a community point of view.

The process around Go is very closed. So not fun. Rust is inbetween.

> Just trying to create the best tool possible for our own daily tasks.

Just like everybody else?

> But we keep coming back. So it cannot be that bad ;)

;o)

>> Indeed, we never snob anyone, and they all snob us. Especially the ignorant C++ community that never mentions us.
>
> Because this hurts some people. The D crowd doesn't snob other languages, in fact, people here often point at features of

I see jabs at other languages, especially the ones that is stealing attention from D: Rust, Go, C++… I guess it is all natural,  but it can be perceived as "envy" by outsiders, and there is no advantage to it.

I really wish people would stop complaining about other languages having the same features as D without giving credit. It is impossible to figure out exactly where ideas from features come from, but most features predate even C++ if being first is the main point.

The hard part about designing an imperative language is not the individual features, the palette is given. The hard part is turning it into beautiful whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. And that is important, but difficult (or impossible) to achieve.

It is kinda like music, I sometimes create a melody that I feel I have heard something similar to, but I cannot pin it down to anything specific. So phrases of the melody might be things I have picked up. However, if we go for novelty the roots for musical elements might go 300 years back or more. Far beyond my knowledge horizon.

A month ago I made a poptune-sketch I kinda find catchy, but familiar. But which tune is it familiar to? Who should I credit? Maybe you can help me out?

https://soundcloud.com/bambinella/anad-dreamer-sketch

On Thursday, 11 June 2015 at 10:17:26 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Thursday, 11 June 2015 at 09:14:00 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> Now, now. It is true that bad and frustrating experience with other languages drove me (and probably others) to D.
>
> Suggesting that a language like D is based on experience in comparison to Go is... not right... given the experienced language designers behind Go.
>
> If experience is key, then Go wins.
>
>> People here often request features you can only ask for after years of programming experience. This shows that there is a lot of experience in the D community. Without experience D wouldn't be where it is, having only limited resources.
>
> Language designers that design more than one language tend to make smaller and tighter languages as they gain design experience and get better at delegating nice-to-have-but-not-essential-features to libraries. Features have a higher cost than initial implementation.
>
> Walter has been more open to feature suggestions than many other designers, and implemented them in a timely fashion, that is true. And that can be both a good thing and a bad thing, but obviously engaging and fun from a community point of view.
>
> The process around Go is very closed. So not fun. Rust is inbetween.
>
>> Just trying to create the best tool possible for our own daily tasks.
>
> Just like everybody else?
>
>> But we keep coming back. So it cannot be that bad ;)
>
> ;o)
>
>>> Indeed, we never snob anyone, and they all snob us. Especially the ignorant C++ community that never mentions us.
>>
>> Because this hurts some people. The D crowd doesn't snob other languages, in fact, people here often point at features of
>
> I see jabs at other languages, especially the ones that is stealing attention from D: Rust, Go, C++… I guess it is all natural,  but it can be perceived as "envy" by outsiders, and there is no advantage to it.
>
> I really wish people would stop complaining about other languages having the same features as D without giving credit. It is impossible to figure out exactly where ideas from features come from, but most features predate even C++ if being first is the main point.
>
> The hard part about designing an imperative language is not the individual features, the palette is given. The hard part is turning it into beautiful whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. And that is important, but difficult (or impossible) to achieve.
>
> It is kinda like music, I sometimes create a melody that I feel I have heard something similar to, but I cannot pin it down to anything specific. So phrases of the melody might be things I have picked up. However, if we go for novelty the roots for musical elements might go 300 years back or more. Far beyond my knowledge horizon.
>
> A month ago I made a poptune-sketch I kinda find catchy, but familiar. But which tune is it familiar to? Who should I credit? Maybe you can help me out?
>
> https://soundcloud.com/bambinella/anad-dreamer-sketch

I have the same problem when composing. Some things sound vaguely familiar but I cannot put my finger on it. Usually I don't follow an idea that somehow sounds familiar.

In your case, the song reminds me of:

Wouldn't It Be Good - Nik Kershaw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYMAtbq0bjY

(God, I'm so old!) :-)

On Thursday, 11 June 2015 at 10:17:26 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Thursday, 11 June 2015 at 09:14:00 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> Now, now. It is true that bad and frustrating experience with other languages drove me (and probably others) to D.
>
> Suggesting that a language like D is based on experience in comparison to Go is... not right... given the experienced language designers behind Go.
>
> If experience is key, then Go wins.

heavily disagree honestly.
Ken Thompson - B?
Rob Pike - Limbo? Joking?

On Thursday, 11 June 2015 at 10:52:06 UTC, Chris wrote:
> vaguely familiar but I cannot put my finger on it. Usually I don't follow an idea that somehow sounds familiar.

Well, in this case it might sound familiar to me because it is based manipulated sample of another tune I made... But I cannot know for sure ;)

> In your case, the song reminds me of:
>
> Wouldn't It Be Good - Nik Kershaw
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYMAtbq0bjY
>
> (God, I'm so old!) :-)

That's not all that old... (hrmph!) But I don't see the resemblance so it's not from there, if it is from anywhere outside my own head.

On Thursday, 11 June 2015 at 10:52:08 UTC, weaselcat wrote:
> heavily disagree honestly.
> Ken Thompson - B?
> Rob Pike - Limbo? Joking?

Not your kind of experience? But still experience...

So there is a limit to how far experience can take you.

Anyway, language designers that do multiple languages on their own accord appears to stay within the same paradigm. Kind of like an artist trying to perfect the aesthetics of their original piece. So if you don't like the original, you'll probably not like the sequel either...

On Thursday, 11 June 2015 at 10:17:26 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>> People here often request features you can only ask for after years of programming experience. This shows that there is a lot of experience in the D community. Without experience D wouldn't be where it is, having only limited resources.
>
> Language designers that design more than one language tend to make smaller and tighter languages as they gain design experience and get better at delegating nice-to-have-but-not-essential-features to libraries.

Then brainfuck wins.

On Thursday, 11 June 2015 at 11:20:12 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> Then brainfuck wins.

Always.

On 10/06/2015 12:38, "Ola Fosheim =?UTF-8?B?R3LDuHN0YWQi?= <ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang@gmail.com>" wrote:
> I think Rust has an advantage over Go in the name Mozilla alone, they
> are more idealistic than Google.

Agreed. In concrete terms, Mozilla is a non-profit, whereas Google is not. Google can easily drop (or reduce) support for Go if it doesn't serve whatever business goal they want. Or alternatively they might not be interested in evolving Go (or Go's toolchain) in directions that are useful for other people, but have little value for their business or technical goals.

Mozilla may see in their heart the will to develop a language such as Rust in part for the benefit of the programming community in general. Even if they don't, and they remain mainly concerned with Servo/browser development, if Rust's core goals are of developing large-scale programs, with strong static checking / verification (safeness), and being able to write highly optimized/fast programs - then that is already a project vision that can make the language highly successful.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros
https://twitter.com/brunodomedeiros