On Mon, 2013-09-09 at 11:07 +0200, Ramon wrote:
[…]
> Is it? Why compete? The only way to attracts large numbers of C++ developers is to become more and more like C++ (incl. of course, massive amounts of libraries and tools) and to end up as some kind of C+++.

The "space of the game" is native code applications. The players currently are Fortran, C, C++, D, Go, Rust, Haskell, OCaml. There are others but they are second division rather than first division. Thus, almost by definition D is competing with C++ for use statistics.

> Python is similar to - nothing (commonly used) - and yet it grew wildly. There are so many to complain about Python's weird indentation syntax. And yet they come and use it. Because it promises something tangible and it delivers. Because there is "the Python way". Because there excellent docs. And because there is no real competitor.

I agree, currently, and quite bizarrely, Python is unique amongst programming languages in that it is seen as the natural partner of native code components.

> Had van Rossum tried to please the perl crowd, he might have attracted some more and quicker but today Python would be a small niche thingy nobody'd care much about.

Python and Perl did compete but they did so head on. It was a philosophical "head on" so compromise was never an issue!

> I feel we should largely ignore C++. I feel that D is grossly inconsequent in a) - very smartly - aiming to be what C++ wanted to be and b) - not at all smartly - trying to please the C++ crowd and to mimick C++ up to the point of at least seriously considering mimicking leper and plague of C++, too.
> 
> D already *is* what C++ wanted to be, namely a more modern C with OO. D shouldn't measure itself against C++ but rather against what C++ wanted to be.
> 
> And there is another immensely important factor: reliability and safety.
> 
> This world gets ever more dependent on software - and software is ever more recognized as unreliable and insecure; hell, there is even an industry living from that (anti virus, anti-malware, etc, etc).
> 
> THAT's the sweet spot. To be what C++ wanted to be - plus - a strong focus on reliability and safety.

C++11 has revitalized C++ in ways that are only just showing themselves. This is a threat to D gaining traction. I am confident D can win the battle for the hearts and minds of native code programmers over C++, but it remains a "head to head" and C++ is established and accepted. D is the newcomer and has to dislodge entrenched position.

There will be an interesting analogy with Java 8 in JVM land.

> The Ada people are not stupid. There is a good reason for them to ponder a year or longer over a new keyword. Bertrand Meyer may have it implemented in a way that looks strange to many but that man isn't stupid at all. The lesson to learn from those two languages known for reliability? Have a tight definition and think long and hard before you make the slightest changes. And *always* keep your "guiding principles" in mind.

Ada and Eiffel are niche languages, Eiffel more so than Ada. Whether good, bad, or doesn't matter this is the case: they are languages used in a very small domain, and even there C++ is allowed.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On 9/9/13 10:38 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Mon, 2013-09-09 at 06:57 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
> […]
>> If someone can point me to how to make it so, I'll take care of it.
>
> I will check, but I think ownership change is a push operation rather
> than a pull operation. Andrei has write powers in both organizations and
> so is the person who can action the ownership transfer. At that point
> the other members of the current organization will lose write permission
> and will have to resort to pull requests themselves.
>
> It is really that someone with write permission has to ensure pull
> requests get actioned in reasonable time with reasonable evidence. Sadly
> this generally involves running the updates themselves as E-Lisp has
> very poor testing facilities so TDD is not really an option :-(

I'd be glad to but I need a fair amount of handholding as I hadn't even heard of most acronyms you mentioned. Probably more effective would be to give you write access appropriately - all that's needed really is responsibility, which I assume you muster :o).

Andrei

On Monday, 9 September 2013 at 09:31:59 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 09/09/13 10:29, Russel Winder wrote:
>> It also appears that Microsoft are beginning to think the whole CLR
>> thing is on it's last legs.
>>
>> The whole "all non-Windows users have to hate C#" thing has some basis
>> in fact but also had a lot of FUD associated with it.  The "Mono hatred"
>> stemmed from that. So will Microsoft go after Mono with patent suits if
>> they are not themselves using C# and CLR? They possibly might as an
>> income stream, but it is unlikely to be profitable and so may be not.
>
> I think the Mono hatred/fear stemmed from a particular time in Linux history which involved a combination of Novell's role as a major driver of Mono in GNOME, Microsoft's very aggressive patent posturing (although no actual lawsuits), and the close relationship between Novell and Microsoft that culminated in their patent agreement.
>
> I don't think Microsoft would ever bother suing over Mono patents just for money -- the concern was always that Novell's pushing of Mono was a Trojan Horse that would enable Microsoft to take down the wider Linux community and Novell to clean up on the business Linux side.
>
>> Without solid support from Microsoft the C#F#/CLR culture is unlikely to
>> remain strong, despite the serious success F# has had in making people
>> interested in CLR. And C# is not a bad language, in many ways much
>> better than Java. But Java has staying power in ways C#/F# do not.
>
> First-mover advantage, cross-platform for longer, less patent fear ...
>
>> I gave Mono-D a whirl, but as I don't do any C# or F#, it has brought in
>> a huge amount of dependencies. My problem is I do not understand how the
>> "Solution" system is the same or different to everyone else's "Project"
>> system. I guess I do not have much enthusiasm to find out as I can just
>> use Emacs.
>
> Yes, the number of dependencies is very, very annoying if you don't want to work with C#/F#.
>
>> GNOME vs. Qt may be religious to certain parties, but most people choose
>> either GNOME or KDE for the desktop and then load the other widget set
>> as well. I use GNOME but I have a many Qt-based things on here and
>> indeed develop PySide and PyQt5 based systems since GNOME is a
>> non-starter on Windows and OS X. Pragmatism is the order of the day here
>> not religious fervour.
>
> Yes, GNOME vs. KDE is the issue, not GTK vs Qt.  Installing a specifically GNOME or KDE app will pull in a ton of dependencies from the other desktop, installing a purely Qt- or GTK-based app is much less heavy (it's almost unavoidable I'd say to have both Qt- and GTK-based code on your system).
>
> I found this out recently when trying to install kcachegrind, which wanted to pull in a ton of stuff from the KDE desktop that really didn't seem necessary. It does apparently include a "qcachegrind" package that's purely Qt-based, but it's not packaged separately for Debian or Ubuntu :-(
>
>> I think that now that Qt has escaped from
>> Microsoft^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HNokia, it will return to being one of the two
>> primary system for cross-platform GUI systems, wxWidgets being the
>> other. Thus I think QtD (fot Qt4 and Qt5) should be seen as an essential
>> component of the D milieu.  wxD should also get some presence. It is
>> great we have GtkD, but I cannot see it ever having any cross-platform
>> traction.
>
> I think that move is already happening and has been for some time -- in fact I think the resurgence of Qt has been happening ever since it was LGPL'd.  My impression is that GTK/GNOME won out historically because the Qt GPL/commercial dual licence meant that there were licensing compatibility issues even for free software, and that there was a single commercial gatekeeper for proprietary software.  That was an undesirable situation to have for the core graphical toolkit of an operating system, so GTK was preferred.
>
> I completely agree that QtD should be a priority project -- I think Qt's importance is only going to grow.
>
> Perhaps this is a nice point to re-iterate my earlier plea for consideration of Qt Creator as a potential cross-platform D IDE? :-)

Personally I think that phobos contains some parts that are in Qt base, so a wrapper isn't a perfect solution for D. It's certainly the fastest way to extend the D framework and add a GUI library, but Qt phylosophy doesn't match perfectly with D. Just take a look to moc, in D it's possible and preferable to do without it.

That why we started DQuick to create a complete adaption of QtQuick to D, this is much hard to do but DQuick has the potential to be much more suitable for D.

On 9/9/13 11:17 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Mon, 2013-09-09 at 18:31 +0200, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> […]
>> I wonder where you got this idea from.
>
> It may just be FUD, but…
>
>> .NET is pretty strong at Microsoft conferences, even this year BUILD had
>> lots of new goodies announced.
>>
>> They can decide to target the WinRT runtime instead of the CLR, go fully
>> native instead of generating MSIL bytecodes, or keep using CLR.
>
> There appears to be a lowering of the CLR position in the Microsoft
> public stances, and a rise of the native position (mostly C++).
> Clearly .NET remains a strong Microsoft technology in the short term,
> but it has not really achieved the penetration recently that perhaps it
> should.

I concur in the sentiment. My perception is that the new Windows 8 architecture (forgot the name... that layered thing) downplays CLR.


Andrei

Am 09.09.2013 22:51, schrieb Andrei Alexandrescu:
> On 9/9/13 11:17 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
>> On Mon, 2013-09-09 at 18:31 +0200, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> […]
>>> I wonder where you got this idea from.
>>
>> It may just be FUD, but…
>>
>>> .NET is pretty strong at Microsoft conferences, even this year BUILD had
>>> lots of new goodies announced.
>>>
>>> They can decide to target the WinRT runtime instead of the CLR, go fully
>>> native instead of generating MSIL bytecodes, or keep using CLR.
>>
>> There appears to be a lowering of the CLR position in the Microsoft
>> public stances, and a rise of the native position (mostly C++).
>> Clearly .NET remains a strong Microsoft technology in the short term,
>> but it has not really achieved the penetration recently that perhaps it
>> should.
>
> I concur in the sentiment. My perception is that the new Windows 8
> architecture (forgot the name... that layered thing) downplays CLR.
>
>
> Andrei

It is called WinRT and while it downplays the CLR, by being based in COM, you can target it with .NET as well.

.NET is not only the CLR, but the language runtime for VB.NET, F# and C#, like phobos and druntime are for D.

So it does not matter if Microsoft throws the CLR out of the window and
replaces it with WinRT, native code, or whatever they can think of.

You can still use C#, VB.NET and F# to target those new runtimes.

So I would say it is an error to think Microsoft's is not investing into those languages, just because they are moving back to native.

--
Paulo

Am 09.09.2013 20:17, schrieb Russel Winder:
> On Mon, 2013-09-09 at 18:31 +0200, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> […]
>> There are lots of options still open and as someone that is active in
>> both JVM and .NET worlds, I don't see .NET slowing down in the
>> enterprise space. Pretty much the contrary actually, looking at the
>> requests for proposals my employer receives.
>
> Clearly we are in very different sectors. Everywhere I am going JVM and
> native is displacing CLR. I can quite happily believe both our
> observations are correct!
> ...

Yes, my world are the Fortune 500 companies, with multiple development sites, where the projects always have an off-shore component as well, usually with 50-100 developers on them.

I seriously doubt I will ever see languages like Scala/F# being used in the types of projects we do. Specially given the average type of skills the project teams have.

--
Paulo

On 10/09/13 04:32, Kapps wrote:
> On Monday, 9 September 2013 at 18:03:20 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote
>>
>> On Windows world, Mercurial still has the edge over Git, given the
>> poor Windows support.
>>
>> This will eventually change given the recent endorsement Microsoft has
>> given to Git on their tooling, but it will still take some time to
>> change.
>>
>> --
>> Paulo
>
> I find Git on Windows to be very nice actually. I just download
> GitExtensions, which installs Git and KDiff and such, as well as an
> awesome extension for Visual Studio. That extension is the best version
> control IDE integration I've ever used. Git Extensions will also set git
> up for command prompt, and optionally include tools like ssh-keygen so
> you can use the command line as you would on Linux. Perhaps there was a
> time that Windows support for Git was terrible, but I find it excellent
> now.

For those who prefer Mercurial to Git (I used to be one but I've since gone with the tide) there is a Mercurial extension <http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/HgGit> which enables you to clone a git repository with Mercurial and then do pushes, pulls etc with that repository as if it were a Mercurial one.  This means that you can use github without having to learn git.

Peter

On 09/09/13 15:55, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Monday, September 09, 2013 07:41:44 Volcz wrote:
>> Good idea!
>>
>> What about other useful projects? I know that a official lexer
>> was discussed some time ago. What about DCD? Should ex VisualD
>> use software like DCD if both are on the dlang GitHub?
>
> The plan is to integrate a full lexer and parser into Phobos (and hopefully
> eventually have dmd use those sometime after the front-end has been converted
> to D). So, I wouldn't expect there to be any separate projects for those to be
> moved into github/d-programming-language.
>
> I also don't think that we should rush and try and shove a bunch of projects
> in the official D github org. If it makes sense to put something there, then we
> should put something there, but IMHO it needs to actually have a good reason
> to be official, not just because it's useful.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis
>

I'll take this opportunity to remind people of dunnart (on github under user name pwil3058) which is an enhanced LALR(1) parser generator for D.  Lexical analysis specification is a part of the overall grammar specification (using std.regex type regular expressions).  The lexical analysis part of this code can also be used separately if desired (but only on strings and not on streams i.e. read the whole file into a string and give it to the lexer rather than giving the lexer the file and letting it pull characters in one at a time).

Unfortunately, like most software, the documentation is still a bit less than ideal/complete but I'll gladly answer questions if anyone wants to use it.

Peter

On Monday, 9 September 2013 at 14:55:34 UTC, Manu wrote:
[...]
> Another thought... what do you reckon about including Visual-D as an
> optional component in the windows DMD installer?
> One-click install that includes an environment for windows users would
> probably kick-start a lot of users.
> It can also simplify the Visual-D installation, which expects you to have
> pre-installed DMD, and prompts for the path to the exe. Since this is known
> during the DMD installer, it removes a few steps from the install process.

Great idea!

Compliments to Russel Winder for simply discussing the matter and staying professional at all times rather than to play group and social games.

Special thanks to Walter Bright for at least indirectly admitting that he didn't care for what I said simply because he judged me to be a troll right away.

As it is senseless anyway for me to discuss here, no matter how polite or well intended, I will accept the unwritten local rules and stay away from this forum and limit myself to the D.learn forum and some others for those cases where I have to contribute some bits.
Thanks in that context also to dicebot who hinted me early on that one needs to stay low here for quite some time until one has earned by merits, usually in the form of code, to have an opinion without being considered a troll.

And generally thanks to all here; I have learned more about D here than I had expected.

Thanks -R