www.digitalmars.com         C & C++   DMDScript  

digitalmars.D - D.challenge

reply Justin Johansson <no spam.com> writes:
I propose and hereby petition Walter to set up a sub D newsgroup
called D.challenge which purpose is to make for a more-specific
forum (rather than the generic d.D) for topics which are related
to discussion about "challenging D to do this or that" in the
context of, say, another programming language or some CS
problem.

My concept of D.challenge is to try and lift the quality of the
discussion to a higher plane whereby D can show its superiority
over other languages (esp. in the Algol and curly-bracey family
of PLs) and/or otherwise be challenged to prevail or fail in some
sort of language/CS problem shoot-out.

Recent time ago people (e.g. Nick Sabalausky), and others at
times before them (e.g. myself/Justin Johansson), have suggested
that the d.D newsgroup be split up into different subgroups for
the purpose of focusing discussions towards achieving better
outcomes but to no avail. <sigh/>

So as a presumptive strike upon this ng, I propose that the
subgroup D.challenge be instantiated as a place of higher
ground for (D) language criticisms and shootouts to play
out.

Who's up to the D.challenge and, if the idea has legs,
can we agree on some charter for this D subforum?

Of course, at the end of the day, D is Walter Bright's
baby and naturally it would be up to W to commission
and sanction "D.challenge".  Still, I think, promoted
effectively, "D.challenge" could become a good marketing
vehicle for D.

Cheers,
Justin Johansson
Aug 25 2010
next sibling parent reply Andrej Mitrovic <andrej.mitrovich gmail.com> writes:
I like this idea. I don't know about showing off "superiority" of D,
but it would be a good way to learn from each other. E.g. one could
submit a solution to a challenge, and then others can refine it to be
safer/faster/better in some regards if they want to, while others
present their solutions that take a different approach.

I know stackoverflow tends to have challenges, but theirs is so often
orriented around the goal of reaching less "lines of code". I'd prefer
if we had different challenges instead of focusing on only one thing.
An example of a challenge would be "here's some unsafe code that does
x and y, the challenge is to make it safe and perform the same
operations" or something like that. Anyway, vote++ from me.

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 6:32 PM, Justin Johansson <no spam.com> wrote:

 I propose and hereby petition Walter to set up a sub D newsgroup
 called D.challenge which purpose is to make for a more-specific
 forum (rather than the generic d.D) for topics which are related
 to discussion about "challenging D to do this or that" in the
 context of, say, another programming language or some CS
 problem.

 My concept of D.challenge is to try and lift the quality of the
 discussion to a higher plane whereby D can show its superiority
 over other languages (esp. in the Algol and curly-bracey family
 of PLs) and/or otherwise be challenged to prevail or fail in some
 sort of language/CS problem shoot-out.

 Recent time ago people (e.g. Nick Sabalausky), and others at
 times before them (e.g. myself/Justin Johansson), have suggested
 that the d.D newsgroup be split up into different subgroups for
 the purpose of focusing discussions towards achieving better
 outcomes but to no avail. <sigh/>

 So as a presumptive strike upon this ng, I propose that the
 subgroup D.challenge be instantiated as a place of higher
 ground for (D) language criticisms and shootouts to play
 out.

 Who's up to the D.challenge and, if the idea has legs,
 can we agree on some charter for this D subforum?

 Of course, at the end of the day, D is Walter Bright's
 baby and naturally it would be up to W to commission
 and sanction "D.challenge". =A0Still, I think, promoted
 effectively, "D.challenge" could become a good marketing
 vehicle for D.

 Cheers,
 Justin Johansson
Aug 27 2010
parent Justin Johansson <no spam.com> writes:
On 28/08/10 06:45, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:

 I like this idea. I don't know about showing off "superiority" of D,
 but it would be a good way to learn from each other. E.g. one could
 submit a solution to a challenge, and then others can refine it to be
 safer/faster/better in some regards if they want to, while others
 present their solutions that take a different approach.


Yes, well, of course I meant to enquote 'superiority' as you rightly
did.  Naturally "superiority" of any PL is dependent upon, or subjective
within, the application domain which a PL purports itself to excel
in (over and above other PLs which compete in the same application
domain).

To set the record straight, may it now be asked (without prejudice :-))
that we qualify what application domain(s) D purports to excel in?

Cheers
Justin Johansson
Sep 01 2010
prev sibling next sibling parent reply Philippe Sigaud <philippe.sigaud gmail.com> writes:
It's a fun idea! Why not just post with '[challenge]' in the object?
People not interested in such threads can skip them easily.

I also propose '[D tricks]' as another meta-subject. For example, did you
know you can have import statements in structs (maybe also in classes, I
don't know)? That way, you can put an Importer struct in a template to give
it access to std functions you need, even when the template is mixed in
another scope.


Philippe
Aug 28 2010
parent Justin Johansson <no spam.com> writes:
On 28/08/10 17:21, Philippe Sigaud wrote:

 It's a fun idea! Why not just post with '[challenge]' in the object?
 People not interested in such threads can skip them easily.

 I also propose '[D tricks]' as another meta-subject. For example, did
 you know you can have import statements in structs (maybe also in
 classes, I don't know)? That way, you can put an Importer struct in a
 template to give it access to std functions you need, even when the
 template is mixed in another scope.


 Philippe


Maybe challenges on their own might be a bit sparse in number,
so perhaps tricks & challenges combined in one forum would be
more substantial?

Then again just posting with either [challenge] or [trick] in
the subject line might do the trick (excuse the pun) .. in which
case D.learn might be the appropriate forum for these suggested
subject annotations, especially also since the traffic on D.learn
is quite low and people wanting to learn or advance their D knowledge
might find D.learn at little more interesting with a sprinkling
of tricks and challenges.

Cheers
Justin Johansson
Aug 28 2010
prev sibling parent bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:
Justin Johansson:

 "challenging D to do this or that" in the
 context of, say, another programming language or some CS
 problem.


In past months I have proposed two little challenges, the second of them was to
implement this RosettaCode task in D, to produce a program that is faster,
shorter and uses less memory than the current D version:
http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Hamming_numbers#D

If you take a look at the Haskell version (that is much faster and uses much
less RAM and has a shorter source code) you see that there is lot of space for
improvement:

hamming = 1 : map (2*) hamming `merge` map (3*) hamming `merge` map (5*) hamming
     where merge (x:xs) (y:ys)
            | x < y = x : xs `merge` (y:ys)
            | x > y = y : (x:xs) `merge` ys
            | otherwise = x : xs `merge` ys
 
main = do
    print $ take 20 hamming
    print $ hamming !! 1690
    print $ hamming !! 999999

(I don't remember yet the other older challenge.)

Bye,
bearophile
Aug 31 2010