• bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> Apr 23 2009
• Georg Wrede <georg.wrede iki.fi> Apr 23 2009

bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:

Don:
 toString() is one of the most dreadful features in D.


It's also one of the most useful, and it's quite easy to understand and use.
You need very little brain to use it. Features that require little/no brain are
very important to me (but surely it's a quality that is at the bottom of the
list of qualities for C++ programmers).

Bye,
bearophile

Georg Wrede <georg.wrede iki.fi> writes:

bearophile wrote:
 Don:
 toString() is one of the most dreadful features in D.


 It's also one of the most useful, and it's quite easy to understand
 and use. You need very little brain to use it. Features that require
 little/no brain are very important to me (but surely it's a quality
 that is at the bottom of the list of qualities for C++ programmers).


Yeah!

Sometimes I feel the C++ committee really thinks *every* C++ programmer 
is a *superhuman*. Not necessarily that he'd be overly intelligent, but 
*definitely* he'd have to keep 72 dozen different

  - best practices
  - gotchas
  - loads of things about his own code
  - rules, rules, rules...
  - exceptions to those rules
  - a load of other crap

in his mind *every* single second he's at the keyboard.
Man, I'm definitely not the one they're designing the language for.

So, yes, a simple feature here, another there, so you can maybe spend a 
minute thinking about what you're actually trying to do with *your* 
code, would be welcome.

Guess why I'm using D instead!

PS, I don't even mind hard-to-grasp things, *as long as* they're simple 
and consistent to *use* for the rest of your life, after you've finished 
pulling your hair when learning them. :-)

Proper documentation, and examples, examples and examples, really make a 
difference here. I find a good example saves hours of trying to read 
somebody's blabbering. That's another thing that I think D does right: 
the source is there, and *especially* I find the unit tests invaluable. 
That's where you see how something is supposed to be used.

Like this morning I found no documentation for
d_time parse(string s);
I simply went to the unit tests. Got it in no time at all!