I have a hard time agreeing with this. In my experience people's single most interesting thing to talk about is themselves. Once you notice that, you see it everywhere. It's such a lure, it's almost irresistible. I've made it a habit to ask them a couple of open questions and then just let them have at it. In a few situations folks lost business with me simply because they were too preoccupied with talking about themselves to simply ask "so... how about you? what do you do?"
It follows that whenever someone has an obsession, it comes up naturally while they talk about themselves.
I don't think it follows. Obsession about a niche topic + good social sense = you're not likely to mention it during random conversations with regular people.
When you ask me open ended question and I am able to talk about that topic, I will talk about that topic. If people ask me about family I talk about family, if people ask me about work I talk about work and if they ask me about sport I talk about sport.
It has nothing to do with what I find most interesting to talk about. It has to do with me assuming that this is what you want to talk about, since you asked about it.
I also kind of expect the person I talk to make own pronouncements about the topic they started, without having to ask "what about you". When I am asking "what about you", it is usually admission that this is not going well, conversation feels one sided and I am desperately trying to make it two sided so I am not the asshole there.
People answering questions does not imply that their favorite thing to talk about is themselves. It’s simply an easy venue to conversation when you don’t know the other person.
What kind of support problems did you have? I found the opposite. It was possible to get such a good level of programmer from the community I was better off having found them letting them go work for the D Foundation on rebuilding compile time function execution. Libraries - meaning a bit more work to have idiomatic style use, but if you write D as C, that's usually okay - and wrapping is a one time cost.
I would say that I have found it to be more of a problem on Windows. That'd because the general C/C++ package management solution on Windows is quite... Old fashioned, and that's not always a D specific problem.
There's plenty you can do with D but not C++, see regex, bitfields, swap member-by-member with checks for mutual pointers, the pegged library for grammars, etc etc.
I don't know, Boost has me convinced that even things like regexes in C++ templates could be possible, if your compiler has a big enough stack to handle very deep template recursions. It's theoretically possible to build a regex parser in C++ templates, right? It would be horrible, but possible.
> It's theoretically possible to build a regex parser in C++ templates, right?
You'd probably do large portions of it in "constexpr" types and functions rather than relying on recursive metaprogramming techniques.
They are also planning on adding overloading based on whether a function is constexpr, which is important if you want the same library to support both compile-time and run-time matchers.
So it's all theoretically possible already. But D has the advantage here in that it's not just possible but usable.
Neither Rust nor Scala hold a candle to D in terms of compile-time introspection. You can do things with it that are near unbelievable - "you must ask yourself if some law of nature was broken" quoted from memory in http://dconf.org/2015/talks/alexandrescu.html
That doesn't make it good. That makes it bad. It doesn't protect the rights of users. It's really important that developer tools are GPL, as that prevents vendor lock-in and EEE tactics.
A two-edged sword in my opinion. GPL always protects the end-user so they can get the source, but it infringes on the creator trying to make closed source software. So as a user I like GPL, but when programming I tend to mostly avoid it. Mine mine mine! :)
I would be careful calling it the "least encumbering"- there are definitely shorter, easier to understand licenses with fewer restrictions (i.e. zero).
The main problem with the public domain is that there is no such thing as "the public domain". Each country has its own copyright law, with its own terms and conditions. What the public domain means in the US is not what the public domain means elsewhere i.e. Germany. In Germany an author has Moral Rights which the author is incapable of giving up and may only transfer as apart of their will. So rather than require all German contributors to be dead and have a will that grants their moral rights to the project, using a permissive license gets the same effect.
SQLite ran into trouble by using public domain, due to it not being recognized and for other reasons, and as a result will sell you a copy under a different license that guarantees your rights.
Several European countries do not recognize the ability of copyright holders to completely give up their copyright. So it needs a license of some kind.
It follows that whenever someone has an obsession, it comes up naturally while they talk about themselves.