May 09, 2006
Don Clugston wrote:
> It might make sense to revive that Wiki page for them, though.
> 

I was thinking of doing something like that, but I think I won't be having time anytime soon afterall... :/

> Other enhancements which seem to have been approved:
> * array literals (for DMD 2.0).
> * array expressions (for DMD 2.0).
> * new 'auto' syntax for allocating classes on the stack.
> * coroutines (for DMD 2.0)
> * combining function pointers and delegates (for DMD 2.0).
> 
> Can anyone think of any more?
> 
> It might make sense to create a DMD2.0 product in Bugzilla to put those into.

Hum... I'm much more worried about "1.0" before that.


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D
May 09, 2006
it's a bit of "way too long"... :) but anyway, what's next?
you want a strict language specification site?
a d language portal?
a big impact flash site?
I'm here to help, just let me know what can I do



It's Tiberiu Gal,
but I never know which is the first and which is the last name
:)
May 09, 2006
In article <4460E78B.9090706@nowhere.com>, Carlos says...
>
>Cool!
>
>Have you decided on a design yet ?
>
>So far it seems to be down to
>
>http://hcoop.net/~natamas/d/template.html

>http://img114.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mockup5ey.jpg http://dworks.marte.ro/template1.png http://dworks.marte.ro/template2.png

Have the designers of these actually shared any HTML with us yet? They look nice as graphics, but it might take horrible HTML/CSS hacks to get them to display as webpages.

jcc7
May 09, 2006
lightoze wrote:
> In article <e3pb46$14ff$2@digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
>> Chris Miller wrote:
>>> At the very least you could have 2 domains (or more); this one could be advertised, and the other could be the brief and pretty one for practical use.
>> There are no brief, pretty, available, and relevant names that I can find.
> 
> What about dlang.org?
> 

I like it, either dlang.org or d-lang.org (there could be better options tough, that haven't occurred yet)

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D
May 09, 2006
John Reimer wrote:

>> Ahh .. Digital Daemon? BSD?
>> What's with that?

> I think that's the host company for his website? :)

Seems that way:
http://www.digitaldaemon.com/ISP/Hosted_Domains.html

--anders
May 09, 2006
Jari-Matti Mäkelä wrote:
> What I meant was that why doesn't Walter want to document approved
> future language features before implementing them. It would be a lot
> easier for other frontend writers to create patches / own
> implementations if there was some documentary in the first place. Walter
> could even tag them with something like "[not implemented yet, will be
> implemented in DMD 1.5 or 2.0]". The Future-link in digitalmars-site is
> badly outdated and inadequate. The bugzilla isn't good for describing
> the syntax or features in a verbose manner.

I don't like bugzilla for new feature requests because:

1) Some idiot will inevitably declare D as "buggy" because bugzilla contains nnnn bug reports, never mind that some large proportion of it is not bug reports, but feature requests. Perception is very, very important, and putting feature requests in bugzilla makes them look like bugs. I have long experience with the shallow QA technique of merely counting the number of entries in a bug database and attempting to infer "quality" based solely on that number. (This was also much of the basis of my reluctance to use bugzilla at all.)

2) Bugzilla is a terrible mechanism for discussion, debate, etc. Newsgroups do threaded discussions very well, but newsgroups are not good for long term discussion, and there tends to be lots of duplication and fluff. A wiki seems to be ideal for this purpose, however.

3) There's generally very little argument about something being a bug or not. But for a feature, there's always lots of room for discussion, alternate syntaxes, various pros and cons, etc. None of that fits in with the binary is/isnot nature of bugzilla.

> I know there are proposals in bugzilla and in the newsgroups. The
> problem is that these are not official in any way. We don't know, what
> would the final implementation be. I bet it would accelerate the
> development of D as a language if there were some centralized guidelines
> somewhere. It would also eliminate some missteps like builtin regexps or
> bit arrays if we could see them syntactically before they are in the
> "production" version. I don't know how Walter sees this, but IMHO
> writing few pages of text in a natural language is a lot less time
> consuming than writing them as a code to the compiler. And you have to
> write those damn docs anyway sooner or later.

Discussion of a new feature will only get you so far. To know if it is right or not, it has to be implemented, and then used in a real program. Take a look at C++, for example. The features in it where the committee standardized existing practice work, the features designed by the committee as the result of endless discussions and expert review (but no implementation), don't work.

The bit feature sure did look good on paper <g>.

It reminds me of when I had some discussions with a professional race car driver. He said that if you weren't once in a while walking back to the pits carrying just the steering wheel, you weren't trying hard enough. If you were walking back too often, you were not thinking.
May 09, 2006
Walter Bright wrote:

-> d-programming-language.org

Whoa, I don't like it either, it's awful. It's too verbose, even if with modern browsers you don't type any more than any other site, it still is verbose. :/
And the disadvantage of that manifests itself in many tiny ways that are hard to detail or explain, but they have their effet I believe (like chaos theory...).

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D
May 09, 2006
Walter Bright wrote:
> Jari-Matti Mäkelä wrote:
>> What I meant was that why doesn't Walter want to document approved future language features before implementing them. It would be a lot easier for other frontend writers to create patches / own implementations if there was some documentary in the first place. Walter could even tag them with something like "[not implemented yet, will be implemented in DMD 1.5 or 2.0]". The Future-link in digitalmars-site is badly outdated and inadequate. The bugzilla isn't good for describing the syntax or features in a verbose manner.
> 
> I don't like bugzilla for new feature requests because:
> 
> 1) Some idiot will inevitably declare D as "buggy" because bugzilla contains nnnn bug reports, never mind that some large proportion of it is not bug reports, but feature requests. Perception is very, very important, and putting feature requests in bugzilla makes them look like bugs. I have long experience with the shallow QA technique of merely counting the number of entries in a bug database and attempting to infer "quality" based solely on that number. (This was also much of the basis of my reluctance to use bugzilla at all.)
> 
> 2) Bugzilla is a terrible mechanism for discussion, debate, etc. Newsgroups do threaded discussions very well, but newsgroups are not good for long term discussion, and there tends to be lots of duplication and fluff. A wiki seems to be ideal for this purpose, however.
> 
> 3) There's generally very little argument about something being a bug or not. But for a feature, there's always lots of room for discussion, alternate syntaxes, various pros and cons, etc. None of that fits in with the binary is/isnot nature of bugzilla.

Ok, I agree. I just read from your previous post that the development of D is now officially concentrated on bug fixing and making a stable release with working add-on software. It all makes a lot more sense now.

> 
>> I know there are proposals in bugzilla and in the newsgroups. The problem is that these are not official in any way. We don't know, what would the final implementation be. I bet it would accelerate the development of D as a language if there were some centralized guidelines somewhere. It would also eliminate some missteps like builtin regexps or bit arrays if we could see them syntactically before they are in the "production" version. I don't know how Walter sees this, but IMHO writing few pages of text in a natural language is a lot less time consuming than writing them as a code to the compiler. And you have to write those damn docs anyway sooner or later.
> 
> Discussion of a new feature will only get you so far. To know if it is right or not, it has to be implemented, and then used in a real program. Take a look at C++, for example. The features in it where the committee standardized existing practice work, the features designed by the committee as the result of endless discussions and expert review (but no implementation), don't work.

Yes, I agree on this one too. Again I thought that there's no serious feature-freeze going on. I was just worried that it's getting too hard to keep up with the upcoming proposals. I know it has been discussed before, but some kind of roadmap indicating that the current beta-state is soon over would look good on digitalmars website.

> The bit feature sure did look good on paper <g>.

Luckily D is a practical language. :)

-- 
Jari-Matti
May 09, 2006
> What's wrong with the design we have at the moment?

Its hard to navigate.  I've come to like the DM/d site but thats because  I love the language and have a soft spot for it, newcomers might be put off.

The download link needs to be readily apparent and listed on the index page, right now its buried on the left pane under the mis-leading title 'Tools'.  It needs to be big and easy to see.

There is a D for Win32 page, but no D for linux or D for Mac.

The one example 'wc' is too large.  There needs to be several examples of increasing complexity.  There also needs to be one big example, well commented, that shows off all the power of D , and easy enough for programmers to refer to for syntax.

The D community is a huge part of D.  An organized and easily locatable page on the D community would help allot.

The news page is deceptively called 'Forum' , and the News link is actually a page describing the newsgroups.

There needs to be a comprehensive set of tutorials on the 'official' site, dsource.org's tutorials would work well.

The Phobos API doc's are good, if not some what incomplete.

I like the comparison chart, but most people respond angrily too it.  I think its better not to compare it to other languages, bluntly saying D is better than X language , while true, just provokes anger.  I think a D for ( C, C++, Java, Python ) programmers articles would provide a better way to ease programmers used to other languages into the language.  Let them 'discover' how kick-ass D is themselves.


The Language link is confusing.  For example, the other day I was looking for the syntax on how to use 'is' for type deduction with templates ( is(T : int ), is ( T == int ) , which is nowhere on the template page.  Searching for 'is' obviously gave me tons of false hits.  It's also not listed alphabetically, I have to go over the entire list to find the 'Arrays' page.


> Seriously, while they may be just what the site might look like and the
> HTML might have not yet been written, web design isn't about graphic
> design.  It's about conveying information in such a way that it is
> accessible to a variety of people in a variety of websurfing environments.

I agree its not _solely_ about graphic design, but an aesthtically pleasing design goes a long way.

I agree strongly about it conveying information.  The best thing this website can do it is to provide easy access to the most common parts of D, and provide a way to easily find any other information thats more specific.

Usability and ease of use are 100% what this site should be about :).

Charlie


Stewart Gordon wrote:
> Carlos wrote:
>> Cool!
>>
>> Have you decided on a design yet ?
> 
> What's wrong with the design we have at the moment?
> 
>> So far it seems to be down to
>>
>> http://hcoop.net/~natamas/d/template.html
>> http://img114.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mockup5ey.jpg
>> http://dworks.marte.ro/template1.png
>> http://dworks.marte.ro/template2.png
> <snip top of upside-down reply>
> 
> Please, not one that's just a huge graphic!
> 
> Seriously, while they may be just what the site might look like and the HTML might have not yet been written, web design isn't about graphic design.  It's about conveying information in such a way that it is accessible to a variety of people in a variety of websurfing environments.
> 
> OK, so there is some importance in the visual presentation, but this is only secondary to structure and usability.  In order to evaluate visual designs for websites, we need to make sure they can be implemented in a way that degrades gracefully and preserves accessibility.
> 
> Stewart.
> 
May 09, 2006
Anders F Björklund wrote:
> John Reimer wrote:
> 
>>> Ahh .. Digital Daemon? BSD?
>>> What's with that?
> 
>> I think that's the host company for his website? :)
> 
> Seems that way:
> http://www.digitaldaemon.com/ISP/Hosted_Domains.html
> 
> --anders

O M G. He runs it out of his HOUSE? An above ground T1? Anyone else want an actual data center?

-- 
Kyle Furlong // Physics Undergrad, UCSB

"D is going wherever the D community wants it to go." - Walter Bright