On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 11:42:47AM -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 4/28/2012 11:10 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >But the overload of 'is' as an operator with 'is()' as an expression
> >(and its various ugly arbitrarily assigned syntaxes)? WAT.
> 
> It's not that unusual for an operator to have a binary form that is totally different from its unary form. Like *

So the 'is' in 'is()' is an _operator_? WAT? That's like saying the 'f'
in 'f(1,2,3)' is an operator. I thought it was the '(1,2,3)' that was
the operator that calls the function f.


> >Seriously, one of the first things I'd like to see in D3 is a complete overhaul of is(). I say again, the various *semantics* of it are extremely useful, and are part of what makes D rock so much. But the *syntax* badly needs a total redesign. We need much saner syntax assigned to each of the current uses of is(), that doesn't look like it was grafted in from a PHP development branch.
> 
> I agree that the IsExpression syntax is a bit of a disaster. Eventually we can redesign it (D3), but there's no way we have time to do that now.

I'm not suggesting that we do that now. :-) But it *is* a disaster, and when the time comes for D3, whenever that may be, it definitely needs an overhaul.


T

-- 
Life is too short to run proprietary software. -- Bdale Garbee

On Saturday, April 28, 2012 21:27:28 q66 wrote:
> So .. D3 is coming? *runs*

I think that the last time that Andrei mentioned anything about D3, he said something about maybe 10 years from now. Certainly, if we were to embark on D3 now, we'd just hamstring D2 and probably kill it. Once D2 is fully stable and well-established, we can look at what's worked with it and what hasn't and look at creating a new iteration of the language. But doing that before D2 is fully stable is suicide. We're taking long enough to reach that _without_ doing does of feature changes.

We can probably add backwards-compatible features later on, but for now, the focus needs to be on stabilizing what we have, and we _definitely_ don't want to completely redesign any aspects of the language at this point.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 08:18:34 UTC, Guillaume Chatelet wrote:
> Sorry for the noise but I think a few language designer out there might like this one :
> http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
>
> I think Walter and Andrei will smile ( or cry ) reading it.
> It's no trolling here, I do think this post is very valuable and relevant from a language design perspective.
Bump.  Nick linked this blog post in another thread and after nosing around his blog, I found another good blog post the guy wrote earlier this year:

http://me.veekun.com/blog/2013/03/03/the-controller-pattern-is-awful-and-other-oo-heresy/

This could be an important strength to highlight in D, since it doesn't have the OO constraints that Java imposes.  Although, I have run into this problem myself when poking around a D project filled with OO boilerplate, with the single function that actually did anything hidden away in a private method in some unexpected class.  Perhaps it's because the project was still being written and the author found it easier to write all his class superstructure first, but I suspect even the finished project had far too much of this OO debris.

The problems of that project can't be blamed on D of course, but that unfortunate mentality seeps in from other languages, which hopefully blog posts like this and better idiomatic D can combat.

On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 11:42:19 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 09:41:06 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Paulo Pinto" <pjmlp@progtools.org> wrote in message
>> news:jngarb$14un$1@digitalmars.com...
>>> Am 28.04.2012 10:18, schrieb Guillaume Chatelet:
>>>> Sorry for the noise but I think a few language designer out there might
>>>> like this one :
>>>> http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
>>>>
>>>> I think Walter and Andrei will smile ( or cry ) reading it.
>>>> It's no trolling here, I do think this post is very valuable and
>>>> relevant from a language design perspective.
>>>
>>> Well, I cry everytime I am using it on my web site, but the effort to
>>> port the scripts is not worth it.
>>
>> Abandoning PHP is *always* "worth it".
>
> Rewriting seldom brings anything new. It almost like starting
> from zero, without the benefit from all the bug fixes the
> software has had along the years.
>
> The hours wasted porting to a new language, could be used adding
> features to existing code base, or refactoring.
>
> I know how I am speaking about, many of the big bucks we get on
> consultancy jobs, are from companies that decide to keep rewriting
> their software on the flavour of the month framework, just because
> "everyone else is doing it".
>
> So I rather keep my "almost clean" PHP scripts running, as getting
> to the trouble of switching ISP just to be able to rewrite the site
> in a more sane language.
>
> --
> Paulo

Nicely said. Precisely my experience. We are all Java programmers in my team, yet we maintain old ASP and PHP code that previous colleagues did in the past. Redoing them from scratch in Java or D is out of question.

Speaking about PHP... I believe we all read that article. I could say worse about ASP than what that article says about PHP.

On Wednesday, 14 August 2013 at 12:09:27 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote:
> Speaking about PHP... I believe we all read that article. I could say worse about ASP than what that article says about PHP.

That doesn't mean that ASP is worse than PHP though. PHP is so bad that I've actually considered offering up my time pro-bono to rewrite sites written in PHP to pretty much anything else.

The only thing that excites me more than seeing PHP die is seeing IE6/7/8 die, and that's already happening. =D

On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 01:56:09 UTC, Tyler Jameson Little wrote:
> On Wednesday, 14 August 2013 at 12:09:27 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote:
>> Speaking about PHP... I believe we all read that article. I could say worse about ASP than what that article says about PHP.
>
> That doesn't mean that ASP is worse than PHP though. PHP is so bad that I've actually considered offering up my time pro-bono to rewrite sites written in PHP to pretty much anything else.
>
> The only thing that excites me more than seeing PHP die is seeing IE6/7/8 die, and that's already happening. =D

That would change much, we would still have Objective C and JS. And you know that everything MUST be done in JS !

On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 01:59:49 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
> On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 01:56:09 UTC, Tyler Jameson Little wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 14 August 2013 at 12:09:27 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote:
>>> Speaking about PHP... I believe we all read that article. I could say worse about ASP than what that article says about PHP.
>>
>> That doesn't mean that ASP is worse than PHP though. PHP is so bad that I've actually considered offering up my time pro-bono to rewrite sites written in PHP to pretty much anything else.
>>
>> The only thing that excites me more than seeing PHP die is seeing IE6/7/8 die, and that's already happening. =D
>
> That would change much, we would still have Objective C and JS. And you know that everything MUST be done in JS !

Heh, at my job last year, one guy was duplicating significant business logic in javascript in the browser, that was already on the server, so that GUI lag was lessened.  This blew my mind as I thought it should have been done in AJAX, so that business logic stayed on the server, as keeping the logic synced would probably get hairy, even though AJAX is not going to be _as_ fast as local javascript.  But there were lots of other problems at that job, and he was so far from the worst of it, that I just looked at him like he was crazy and moved on. :)

You mention Obj-C: how bad is it?  I don't frequent Apple sites and nobody really talks about it in my orbit.  I figure it must be pretty bad since it was designed decades ago and hasn't been updated much, but I'd like to hear what exactly it gets wrong.

On 2013-08-15 12:51, Joakim wrote:

> You mention Obj-C: how bad is it?  I don't frequent Apple sites and
> nobody really talks about it in my orbit.  I figure it must be pretty
> bad since it was designed decades ago and hasn't been updated much, but
> I'd like to hear what exactly it gets wrong.

It has quite an ugly syntax for the calling and declaring methods. Apple has updated it quite a lot in recent years. It's getting better and better each year. Some recent changes:

* Modules
* No need for forward references (at least not for methods)
* New object literals
* Fast enumeration (quite old)
* A simple variant of operator overloading
* Automatically synthesizing of properties

Plus a bunch of other things I can't remember right now.

I like the object model and it's dynamic nature. It's easy to call a method via a selector (string).

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 15/08/13 20:51, Joakim wrote:
> On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 01:59:49 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>> On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 01:56:09 UTC, Tyler Jameson Little wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, 14 August 2013 at 12:09:27 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote:
>>>> Speaking about PHP... I believe we all read that article. I could
>>>> say worse about ASP than what that article says about PHP.
>>>
>>> That doesn't mean that ASP is worse than PHP though. PHP is so bad
>>> that I've actually considered offering up my time pro-bono to rewrite
>>> sites written in PHP to pretty much anything else.
>>>
>>> The only thing that excites me more than seeing PHP die is seeing
>>> IE6/7/8 die, and that's already happening. =D
>>
>> That would change much, we would still have Objective C and JS. And
>> you know that everything MUST be done in JS !
>
> Heh, at my job last year, one guy was duplicating significant business
> logic in javascript in the browser, that was already on the server, so
> that GUI lag was lessened.  This blew my mind as I thought it should
> have been done in AJAX, so that business logic stayed on the server, as
> keeping the logic synced would probably get hairy, even though AJAX is
> not going to be _as_ fast as local javascript.  But there were lots of
> other problems at that job, and he was so far from the worst of it, that
> I just looked at him like he was crazy and moved on. :)
>
> You mention Obj-C: how bad is it?  I don't frequent Apple sites and
> nobody really talks about it in my orbit.  I figure it must be pretty
> bad since it was designed decades ago and hasn't been updated much, but
> I'd like to hear what exactly it gets wrong.

It's pretty ugly.  But at least it's not C++.

Peter