On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 13:03:03 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/23/2015 7:35 PM, Joakim wrote:
>> On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 01:08:38 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>> Time to give your old articles a better home, I think, assuming you have the
>> copyright or can get it.
>
> https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b89.html

Firefox gives me this:

www.digitalmars.com uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is only valid for digitalmars.com
(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)

And I believe this is an old problem.

On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 16:37:29 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 24/12/15 02:08, Walter Bright wrote:
>> This has resurfaced on Reddit:
>>
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3xya5v/so_you_want_to_write_your_own_language/
>
> In the comments, about the cluttered syntax. For the attributes, due to legacy reasons, it seems like D got all the defaults wrong. System instead of safe, mutable instead of immutable, not pure instead of pure and so on. We might not be able to get rid of any attributes but if some of these defaults were different perhaps it would not be necessary to use so many attributes all the time.
>
> I know that many here don't agree but personally I think the language could have less syntax it had AST macros. Some syntax that is built-in now could be moved to library code in the form of macros.

I agree. As we all know, these choices have much to do with trying not to disturb all the welcome people from C/C++. But now that D is becoming a more self-confident language, and a larger percentage of newcomers to D have other backgrounds than C/C++, it is becoming increasingly important to have the language "do the Right Thing" from the outset.

By now the former C/C++ programmer has to learn an entirely new language, as compared to 5 or especially 10 years ago, when D could (well, at least sarcastically) be described as just another Dialect of C.

Today, D is a proud and strong, and not even a new, language, and the Default choices of system/safe, (im)mutable, (not)safe, etc., should be based only on choices that are obvious when we look at D now and in the foreseeable future. Not on what the past was.

On 12/24/2015 5:25 AM, Joakim wrote:
> Ah, I see you have it here instead:
>
> https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b90.html
>
> Any idea why it's not indexed?

It's in the menu on the left.

On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 16:37:29 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 24/12/15 02:08, Walter Bright wrote:
>> This has resurfaced on Reddit:
>>
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3xya5v/so_you_want_to_write_your_own_language/
>
> In the comments, about the cluttered syntax. For the attributes, due to legacy reasons, it seems like D got all the defaults wrong. System instead of safe, mutable instead of immutable, not pure instead of pure and so on. We might not be able to get rid of any attributes but if some of these defaults were different perhaps it would not be necessary to use so many attributes all the time.
>
> I know that many here don't agree but personally I think the language could have less syntax it had AST macros. Some syntax that is built-in now could be moved to library code in the form of macros.


I think it depends a lot on your personal preference. For instance, I am always annoyed about immutable types being forced upon me (okay, they wouldn't be forced, but I'd have to work to get rid of them). I like mutable types.

Regarding the AST macros - I simply don't know enough about how that works in practice to have an opinion. Java doesn't have that stuff, so I don't know what I am missing :-)

On Friday, 25 December 2015 at 02:56:31 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/24/2015 5:25 AM, Joakim wrote:
>> Ah, I see you have it here instead:
>>
>> https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b90.html
>>
>> Any idea why it's not indexed?
>
> It's in the menu on the left.

Never mind, I looked some more and it is in google's index.  When I initially tried googling the phrase "perhaps you should consider taking up a career as a chartered accountant instead of writing a language" from that piece, it only turned up the spam site, same when I try it now.  I'm used to Google being pretty good at finding specific phrases like that, so I thought the article wasn't indexed.  Guess google is slipping...

On 25/12/15 04:25, Jakob Jenkov wrote:

> I think it depends a lot on your personal preference. For instance, I am
> always annoyed about immutable types being forced upon me (okay, they
> wouldn't be forced, but I'd have to work to get rid of them). I like
> mutable types.

Yeah, we don't need to flip all the defaults, but something like safe/system has clearly the wrong default.

> Regarding the AST macros - I simply don't know enough about how that
> works in practice to have an opinion. Java doesn't have that stuff, so I
> don't know what I am missing :-)

There's a lot of stuff that Java doesn't have ;). In theory, all the lowerings that the compiler already does could be implemented with AST macros. "scope" is lowered to try-catch-finally, "foreach" is lowered to a "for" loop and so on.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 12/26/2015 4:05 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> There's a lot of stuff that Java doesn't have ;). In theory, all the lowerings
> that the compiler already does could be implemented with AST macros. "scope" is
> lowered to try-catch-finally, "foreach" is lowered to a "for" loop and so on.


Many of the lowerings require semantic information that is not available from ASTs.

On 2015-12-27 00:55, Walter Bright wrote:

> Many of the lowerings require semantic information that is not available
> from ASTs.

Hence the "in theory" ;). It's hard to tell what would be possible to implement with AST macros without implementing the complete macro system and use it. Of course it's possible to look what's possible in other languages.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg