[buug] [svlug] Brief Success Summary, Call4Speakers, Attendees, July5 Sat BerkeleyITP was:Re: Good try, and suggestions...

[Chris Miller]

Aaron Porter wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 10:45:30PM -0700, Chris Miller wrote:
>   
>> D is an up-and-coming language which focuses on real-world usability
>> instead of bleeding-edge academic features or rock-solid speed or
>> reliability.
>>     
>
> 	Ok, I'll bite. What kind of real world programming tasks are best
> for a language that offers slow, unreliable functionality?
While it is about as fast as C/C++, it doesn't take the stance that 
everything is secondary to performance.  As such it does feature 
luxuries such as automated garbage collection, or the absolutely 
brain-dead "everything must be caught as an exception, or else it must 
be a compile-time-error" dementia of Java.

If you can make a Java program compile, it is possible to catch every 
error through exception handling, bar none.  This is excellent for 
applications where reliability is critical, since if the application is 
coded correctly is is possible to recover from every error.  On the 
other hand, it does significantly decrease the overall performance of 
the application.

C and C++ are quite possibly the fastest programming languages out 
there, but they are more difficult to code in due to their lack of 
integrated garbage collection.  There are solutions such as Bohemian 
Garbage Collection and Boost C++'s shared pointers, but (with the 
exception of Bohemian) they still require manual resolution of when an 
object falls out of scope.  While there are a lot of programmers who are 
very talented and have no problem tracking scope information, a lot of 
newer programmers are not as comfortable with their concepts and forget 
to do that a lot (causing memory leaks which make restarting the program 
necessary).  The vast majority of programmers are not of the caliber to 
competently use C and/or C++ effectively, as the "world of software" for 
Windows has so convieniently demonstrated.

Digital Mars D provides the performance on par with C and C++ still with 
most of the reliability features of slower languages such as Java.  As 
such I would not term it the end-all language (it's not yet managed to 
beat either camp in either way) but it makes an absolutely fantastic 
middle ground.  It's not specifically for RAD (Rapid Application 
Development) (languages such as Ruby and Java) and it's not for 
bleeding-edge performance (embedded C/C++, ASM, etc.)

It's the only middle-ground I have yet seen.

-- 
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