Derek Parnell wrote:

> My 10-year-old daughter was writing a story for her homework. There was one
> paragraph that was just not coming out right. So I got her to explain to me
> what the paragraph was trying to say, as opposed to what it was actually
> saying. The act of her explaining it to me enabled her to discover the
> precise words that the paragraph needed. It only took a few minutes.

For those without daughters / dads, you can try other patient listeners:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RubberDucking

--anders

>I know that many programmers dislike garbage collection. I suspect that only true experts like Walter really know how expensive a garbage collector is in various situations, can correctly evaluate its usefulness and devise an efficient implementation - and am afraid that if D had been a community-project from the ground up, this wonderful feature would have been one of the first to be dropped due to popular demand.

I don't think so. GCs have been there since LISP wich is one of the oldest programming languages. Most polular languages have a GC. I don't know any functional languages without a GC and most OO languages have a GC, too. Only pure proceduaral languages come without a GC, because there isn't much use for it. But D isn't a pure procedural language, so it's obvious that D should have a GC, IMHO.

I Vote for GC!
"Walter" <newshound@digitalmars.com> дÈëÏûÏ¢ÐÂÎÅ:d49ed9$13kn$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>
> "Andreas Schmid" <monkey@gmx.info> wrote in message news:d4997k$v07$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>> I know that many programmers dislike garbage collection. I suspect that
> only
>> true experts like Walter really know how expensive a garbage collector is
> in
>> various situations, can correctly evaluate its usefulness and devise an efficient implementation - and am afraid that if D had been a community-project from the ground up, this wonderful feature would have
> been
>> one of the first to be dropped due to popular demand.
>
> I, for a very long time, was convinced that garbage collectors were
> crutches
> for poor programmers, and that there's no way a gc app could beat a
> carefully written explicitly memory managed app. It's so obvious by
> inspection. It's the conventional wisdom (see the thread entitled "Why do
> you program in C++?" 4/18/2005 on comp.lang.c++.moderated).
>
> Then, when writing a Java compiler, I was forced into dealing with one.
> Imagine my disbelief when I discovered that gc programs are often
> *faster*,
> in addition to being quicker to write and less buggy. This effect is often
> why D outperforms C++, to the point where the proponents of the
> Conventional
> Wisdom have literally accused me of "sabotaging" C++.
>
> (Of course, gc isn't a panacea for all memory management problems, which
> is
> why D allows one to use explicit memory management where that makes
> sense.)
>
> An interesting discovery I made was that much of the numbing complexity in C++ comes from attempts to deal with managing memory.
>
> 

John Reimer wrote:
> ...
> 2) It was never suggested (to my knowledge) that the language should be
> open-sourced.  This was not the object of the "F-word" discussions.
> 
> ...
> For #2, "open-sourcing" has some pretty hefty connotations.  Previous
> discussions really made no aspersion to such an idea.  They emphasized better
> interaction/communication/feedback with/to Walter.  There were hopes that if
> Walter surrounded himself with a semi-official committee of sorts, there would
> be better accountability and responsiveness.  This is the current problem.  The
> single man team called Walter doesn't or can't respond to suggestions from
> people struggling with langauage issues in important projects (especially as the
> size of the d community grows and the number of d projects increases --
> overload!).  And if he does respond, fixes don't occur fast enough to keep
> important projects rocketing forward.
> ...
> - JJR

FWIW, D has been open sourced (not just suggested).  Ref:  gdc.
This doesn't reflect on Walter at all, but I'd be much less interested if there weren't an open source edition.

In article <d4blvk$3e1$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Charles Hixson says...
>
>John Reimer wrote:
>> ...
>> 2) It was never suggested (to my knowledge) that the language should be
>> open-sourced.  This was not the object of the "F-word" discussions.
>> 
>> ...
>> For #2, "open-sourcing" has some pretty hefty connotations.  Previous
>> discussions really made no aspersion to such an idea.  They emphasized better
>> interaction/communication/feedback with/to Walter.  There were hopes that if
>> Walter surrounded himself with a semi-official committee of sorts, there would
>> be better accountability and responsiveness.  This is the current problem.  The
>> single man team called Walter doesn't or can't respond to suggestions from
>> people struggling with langauage issues in important projects (especially as the
>> size of the d community grows and the number of d projects increases --
>> overload!).  And if he does respond, fixes don't occur fast enough to keep
>> important projects rocketing forward.
>> ...
>> - JJR
>
>FWIW, D has been open sourced (not just suggested).  Ref:  gdc. This doesn't reflect on Walter at all, but I'd be much less interested if there weren't an open source edition.
>

My statement about open-source was indeed ambiguous, I apologize. I meant "open-sourcing" the /language/ as in "opening" the language /specification/ to free, unmoderated public modification.  My point was to indicate that doing so was not the topic of discussion in previous posts (perhaps I interpreted wrong?).  It was not my intention to refer to the actual software tools that implement the language specification (open source tools for D do indeed exist).  Poor choice of words on my part, I fear.  D definitely needs the rudder operator, and Walter is it.  But the rudder operator needs a bunch more oars-men to move that boat.

"Anders F Björklund" <afb@algonet.se> wrote in message news:d4ags7$241b$2@digitaldaemon.com...
> TechnoZeus wrote:
>
> >> This works, as Derek Parnell mentioned, on other things as well - even math, history, speech skills, and the like.  It all goes back to the well-accepted idea that you never really know something until you both can and have taught it to someone else.
> >
> > Yep.  I've always felt that a person generally learns more by teaching than by studying.  :)
>
> Funny, I read that as *earns* more - and agreed to that too ;-)
>
> --anders

Hehe.  Cute.  :)

TZ