4 ms·

I'm not sold. Why do I want a scripting language to glue together that is designed to be good a glueing things together? It's a common misconception that progr

by mhh__ 6y ago

I'm not sold. Why do I want a scripting language to glue together that is designed to be good a glueing things together? It's a common misconception that programming languages are either fast or expressive - D is both. The rub is probably that you need to know more about programming in the sense that you have to have good aesthetic taste but also a knowledge of what makes programs actually fast to achieve both. And besides, what is a script? Code. If you're really only going to use a file once, then I guess do what ever you want but most "scripts" end up being programs.

cleberz 6y ago
You are entitled to your opinion, sir. Have a nice day.
na85 6y ago
>Why do I want a scripting language to glue together that is designed to be good a glueing things together? A good example might be calling legacy libraries like BLAS and LAPACK. These are battle-tested libraries that represent probably hundreds of millions of dollars of developer time, but Fortran is annoying for IO-heavy tasks (at least in my opinion). I like that I can spin up a scripting language like python and call into LAPACK for performance and correctness, but still have modern and ergonomic networking or what have you.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Again, D is designed to make calling into C code easy within the same program you were working on. The idea that you can't have a language that is both expressive and fast is just Stockholm syndrome from C++ being unergonomic. Check it out on the website, you can write an RPN calculator in D in less lines than a Haskell implementation last time I checked, all while checked to be pure by the compiler. Not only would a scripting language be slower because the compiler would be a hack without access to LTO and not have a proper type system etc., It would he a complete waste of time.

4 ms·

I'm not sold. Why do I want a scripting language to glue together that is designed to be good a glueing things together? It's a common misconception that progr

by mhh__ 6y ago

cleberz 6y ago
You are entitled to your opinion, sir. Have a nice day.
na85 6y ago
>Why do I want a scripting language to glue together that is designed to be good a glueing things together? A good example might be calling legacy libraries like BLAS and LAPACK. These are battle-tested libraries that represent probably hundreds of millions of dollars of developer time, but Fortran is annoying for IO-heavy tasks (at least in my opinion). I like that I can spin up a scripting language like python and call into LAPACK for performance and correctness, but still have modern and ergonomic networking or what have you.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Again, D is designed to make calling into C code easy within the same program you were working on. The idea that you can't have a language that is both expressive and fast is just Stockholm syndrome from C++ being unergonomic. Check it out on the website, you can write an RPN calculator in D in less lines than a Haskell implementation last time I checked, all while checked to be pure by the compiler. Not only would a scripting language be slower because the compiler would be a hack without access to LTO and not have a proper type system etc., It would he a complete waste of time.