Interview with InformIT part 2/3

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, August 18, 2010 09:59:27 bearophile wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu:
> > http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d2j8n/d_programming_language
> > _interview_with_andrei/
> 
> I will need time to digest this interesting second part of your interview,
> you say many complex things.
> 
> In the meantime that Reddit thread is one of the worst I've seen on that
> usually interesting site. Some C++ programmers seem to hate D a lot. Each
> new programming language is built on different values. Maybe D2 is not
> targeted to most of the experienced C++ programmers. Maybe D2 is more fit
> for other kinds of programmers, after all. I don't know.

Every language has those who like it and those who don't. And everyone who uses 
a language has their own reasons for liking it or disliking. In many ways, D is 
striking the spot between C++ and Java/C#. It's trying to have the power and 
efficiency of C++ while having the saftey of Java and C#. As such, it will attract 
people from both camps, but there are going to be people from both camps who 
aren't going to like it, if nothing else because it goes too far towards the 
other end of the spectrum for them. And when you like one language and are well 
aware of its pros and cons and then go and look at another language, it's very 
easy to see things that don't match what you like about the language that you 
know, and without really working with it, you're not really going to be well 
enough of all of its pros and cons to really decide whether those differences are 
worth it. I'm both a C++ and Java programmer, and I love D. In many ways, it's 
exactly what I'm looking for in a language, which is why I'm so excited about 
it, but there are plenty of things in D which can be very annoying - like the 
lack of struct default constructors (or as you mentioned, the state of tuples).

Ultimately, the folks who are most likely to be interested in D are those who 
aren't entirely happy with the language that they're using and find D's feature 
set to be an attractive alternative - that and the folks who are forced to use 
it because that's what's being used on the project that they're working on, but 
that's likely fairly rare at this point.

In any case, I'm certain that there are a lot of C++ programmers who will love D 
and a lot who will hate it.

- Jonathan M Davis