March 02, 2018
On Fri, 2018-03-02 at 11:52 +0000, Russel Winder wrote:
> […]
> report science, does make science dodgy. But that stray off topic for
[…]

s/does/does not/

Obviously. :-)

-- 
Russel.
==========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk


March 02, 2018
On Friday, 2 March 2018 at 12:02:43 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Fri, 2018-03-02 at 11:52 +0000, Russel Winder wrote:
>> […]
>> report science, does make science dodgy. But that stray off topic for
> […]
>
> s/does/does not/
>
> Obviously. :-)

mmm...freudian slip??

I study science...and what's being taught to us .. is dodgy.

and anyway, since when do D forum discussion stay on topic?

C ruleZ!

..and D does too ;-)

... and I don't want to hear about Rust.
So lets agree to never, ever mention that word...ever again.

March 02, 2018
On Friday, 2 March 2018 at 11:16:51 UTC, psychoticRabbit wrote:
> On Friday, 2 March 2018 at 10:21:05 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
>>
>> ...continue with C in the face of overwhelming evidence
>> it is the wrong thing to do.
>
> yeah, the health fanatics who promote their crap to goverments and insurance agencies, use very similar arguments about sugar, salt, alchohol, this and that....
>
> when really, it's all about moderation, not prohibition (or increased taxes on things people say are bad).
>
> and science is so dodgy these days, that even scientific evidence requires evidence.

No, it is about costs and saving people lives.

It is cheaper to prevent diseases than trying to cure them afterwards,
specially chronic ones that cause people's death.

Likewise, it is cheaper to prevent security exploits caused by memory corruption by not having them, instead of having to pay millions of dollars in compensation to everyone has was impacted by one.

>
> c rules!

Thanks to AT&T not being able to sell UNIX, giving it by a symbolic price for universities like Berkely, followed by a few startups like Sun and SGI basing their OS on it.

Had AT&T been allowed to sell UNIX at the same price of VMS, OS/z and others, and C wouldn't rule anywhere.

And if you like C so much, what are you doing in a safe systems programming language forum?
March 02, 2018
On Fri, 2018-03-02 at 12:16 +0000, psychoticRabbit via Digitalmars-d- announce wrote:
> On Friday, 2 March 2018 at 12:02:43 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> > On Fri, 2018-03-02 at 11:52 +0000, Russel Winder wrote:
> > > […]
> > > report science, does make science dodgy. But that stray off
> > > topic for
> > 
> > […]
> > 
> > s/does/does not/
> > 
> > Obviously. :-)
> 
> mmm...freudian slip??

:-)

> I study science...and what's being taught to us .. is dodgy.

So, one of:

– the teaching is bad;
– the learner is not up to it; or
– both.

Science, in and of itself, cannot be dodgy.

Yes there are debates to be had, cf. Popper, Kuhn, etc. but the foundation of science is hypotheses, experimentation, and reproducibility. It can be done badly or well by people, but it is not a dodgy thing.

> and anyway, since when do D forum discussion stay on topic?

Usually, but then an [OFF-TOPIC] marker gets added in the thread when a drift occurs.

> C ruleZ!
> 
> ..and D does too ;-)
> 
> ... and I don't want to hear about Rust.
> So lets agree to never, ever mention that word...ever again.

Perhaps you do not, but Rust, like Go, is getting traction in the world out there. Like COBOL, C will always be there, but its use will diminish rapidly.

-- 
Russel.
==========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk


March 02, 2018
On Friday, 2 March 2018 at 13:05:58 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
>
> Usually, but then an [OFF-TOPIC] marker gets added in the thread when a drift occurs.
>

Which is pretty much meaningless when using the web client, because it has a linear non-threaded history by default :)
March 02, 2018
That's a much nicer way of saying what I was trying to get across.  :-) Early respondents to a lengthy survey about D usage are not necessarily a good representation of the more casual user's needs for the language.

--bb



On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 1:49 PM, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d-announce <digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, March 01, 2018 13:24:29 Bill Baxter via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> > Just don't overlook the fact that people who fill out 30 minute surveys right away after being told about them are a self-selected group of
> people
> > who apparently have way too much time on their hands.
> > Which also suggests they would likely also have more free time to go
> chase
> > down and fix breaks in their legacy code caused by new compilers.
>
> It's also the case that the folks who even see this survey are likely to be
> a fairly small percentage of the actual user base. So, while its results
> may
> be useful, they need to be viewed with that fact in mind.
>
> That being said, I think that it's a given that we need to make breaking changes at least occasionally. The question is more how big they can be and how we go about it. Some changes would clearly be far too large to be worth it, whereas others clearly pay for themselves. The harder question is the stuff in between.
>
> For instance, while we might not actually have a new operator if D were
> being redesigned from the ground up (Andrei has previously stated that it
> really should have just been a function in the standard library or
> runtime),
> that would be far too large a change with far too little benefit to be even
> vaguely worth it at this point. On the other hand, we _did_ change it so
> that switch statements don't have implicit fallthrough anymore, and that
> change was _very_ well received, because it caught bugs and it was a quick
> fix to update correct code that was then an error (it was probably also
> true
> that relatively little correct code had to be updated, but that's harder to
> measure).
>
> Each potential breaking change has to be weighed on its own, and the real question is how strongly we weight the pros vs the cons. We could choose to favor breaking code only when it's cleary _very_ benificial to do so, or we could choose to break code any time there's even a slight benefit to it. I think that it's pretty clear that the right choice is somewhere in between those two extremes, but it's not an easy question as to where it is.
>
> And as has been discussed before, we have folks clamoring for breaking changes and folks clamoring for nothing to ever break, and sometimes, they're exactly the same folks. :|
>
> - Jonathan M Davis
>
>


March 03, 2018
On Friday, 2 March 2018 at 13:05:58 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
>
> Science, in and of itself, cannot be dodgy.
>

science must involve humans, and humans are often dodgy.

> Yes there are debates to be had, cf. Popper, Kuhn, etc. but the foundation of science is hypotheses, experimentation, and reproducibility. It can be done badly or well by people, but it is not a dodgy thing.
>

there is no science without humans - they are two sides of the one coin.
If humans can be dodgy, so can science.

>
> Perhaps you do not, but Rust, like Go, is getting traction in the world out there. Like COBOL, C will always be there, but its use will diminish rapidly.

Only when hardware becomes significantly faster, will C begin to fade, as then the case for C diminishes.

I do like the simplicity of Go - and then there are days when I just hate that simplicity. That R?s? thing...well...it is too odd for most people to embrace, I think

It is worth keeping an eye on .NET - as Microsoft are very determined to make this a cross platform runtime, and programming in C# is just .. nice.

And if I recall correctly, Java and .NET still dominate the employment opportunities, and as 'safety' is becoming even more and more important, I think that is likely to stay that way for a long time to come.

So I think all these new languages will just be playgrounds for ideas, or become domain specific languages, while .NET and JAVA use will continue to increase.

March 03, 2018
On Friday, 2 March 2018 at 12:20:31 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>
> And if you like C so much, what are you doing in a safe systems programming language forum?

How safe is D.. i mean really ;-)

and why do people ask me that question.. I don't get it.

I program (or try to) in as many languages as my brain can handle ;-)

(which oddly enough, seems to be stuck at about 7)

March 03, 2018
On Saturday, 3 March 2018 at 01:59:15 UTC, psychoticRabbit wrote:
> On Friday, 2 March 2018 at 12:20:31 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>>
>> And if you like C so much, what are you doing in a safe systems programming language forum?
>
> How safe is D.. i mean really ;-)
>
> and why do people ask me that question.. I don't get it.
>
> I program (or try to) in as many languages as my brain can handle ;-)
>

Basically I hope you have goals or some system to pick these.

> (which oddly enough, seems to be stuck at about 7)

O.T.: Which is a well known number when it comes to cognition. It’s usually 7+-2.

March 03, 2018
On Sat, 2018-03-03 at 13:51 +0000, Dmitry Olshansky via Digitalmars-d- announce wrote:
> […]
> 
> O.T.: Which is a well known number when it comes to cognition. It’s usually 7+-2.

A number that is often misunderstood, and misused. As in this case.

http://www.intropsych.com/ch06_memory/magical_number_seven.html

-- 
Russel.
==========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk