Does anyone find the example on the landing page particularly exciting? (aside from it using an rdmd shebang) Anything that makes you, as a programmer, think -- huh, that's interesting, I'll need to check that out.

It would be nice if it showcases more of D's strong parts, e.g. type inference -- so an "auto" declaration could be used, maybe assoc arrays or range stuff. Maybe even a little bit of templating seeing how that's an integral part of D and how much more natural meta code looks like as compared to many other languages.

This is a very important snippet of code as it serves as the face of the front page of the language, I suggest we put some thought into it and make it more interesting and elegant. Any objections? Any takers?

Another option is to have multiple code samples and rotate them -- that's what Ruby does.

On Friday, 23 January 2015 at 13:34:36 UTC, aldanor wrote:
> Does anyone find the example on the landing page particularly exciting? (aside from it using an rdmd shebang) Anything that makes you, as a programmer, think -- huh, that's interesting, I'll need to check that out.
>
> It would be nice if it showcases more of D's strong parts, e.g. type inference -- so an "auto" declaration could be used, maybe assoc arrays or range stuff. Maybe even a little bit of templating seeing how that's an integral part of D and how much more natural meta code looks like as compared to many other languages.
>
> This is a very important snippet of code as it serves as the face of the front page of the language, I suggest we put some thought into it and make it more interesting and elegant. Any objections? Any takers?
>
> Another option is to have multiple code samples and rotate them -- that's what Ruby does.

In fact, the current example (which is not the greatest of all) is essentially a one/two-liner, something along the lines of:

    auto lines = stdin.byLine.map!(line => line.length);
    writefln("Average line length: %.4f.", 1.0 * lines.sum / lines.array.length);

Ofc this is not the greatest piece of code ever and it's not lazy, but at the very least it showcases an auto declaration, a lambda, a formatted print, a template invocation and UFCS syntax, you get the point... oh wait, that and a lack of a "mean" function in the standard library...

I bet you will come up with much better ideas!

aldanor:

>     auto lines = stdin.byLine.map!(line => line.length);
>     writefln("Average line length: %.4f.", 1.0 * lines.sum / lines.array.length);
>
> Ofc this is not the greatest piece of code ever and it's not lazy,

lines.walklength seems better than lines.array.length, but you can also use a reduce with two functions (a sum and a counting one), scanning the input file only once.


> oh wait, that and a lack of a "mean" function in the standard library...

Yes, it's worth adding to Phobos.

Bye,
bearophile

> Yes, it's worth adding to Phobos.

The issue:
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14034

Bye,
bearophile

On Friday, 23 January 2015 at 13:55:04 UTC, aldanor wrote:
>     auto lines = stdin.byLine.map!(line => line.length);
>     writefln("Average line length: %.4f.", 1.0 * lines.sum / lines.array.length);

This won't work; `sum` already consumes the range, so there will be nothing left to compute the length from.

On Friday, 23 January 2015 at 13:34:36 UTC, aldanor wrote:
> Does anyone find the example on the landing page particularly exciting? (aside from it using an rdmd shebang) Anything that makes you, as a programmer, think -- huh, that's interesting, I'll need to check that out.

Further, I believe we should show off D in all its virtue

at http://dlang.org/hash-map.html

by addition to

    int* p = ("hello" in aa);
    if (p !is null) {}

also include the even compacter

    if (auto p = "hello" in aa) {}

along with

    if (const p = "hello" in aa) {}

in the non-mutating case.