Gary Willoughby: "Why Go's design is a disservice to intelligent programmers"

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Monday, 30 March 2015 at 08:53:15 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:

> same theme. I pick them based on what they+ecosystem is good 
> at, not the language by itself. So basically, you have to be 
> best at one particular application area to do well. Go is 
> aiming to have a good runtime for building smaller 
> web-services, and they are getting there. Because they focus.

It is necessary to be appealing to Ola by Ola's standards for a 
language to appeal to other people?

I think how it actually works is that you have to find a small 
but focused group of people to love you lots.  Then they tell 
other people and over time you get better at appealing to those 
for whom you weren't ready before.  So that's similar to what you 
suggest in one sense, except that the chicken and egg problem is 
smaller.  Sociomantic didn't consider the ecosystem when 
selecting D (or at least were not put off by its immaturity).  
But if in five years time their competitors realize the 
possibilities for doing things better, they will certainly 
benefit from the work Sociomantic has done on improving D (even 
purely as a demanding use case, but it's more than that).  [And 
Sociomantic won't lose, in my uninformed estimation, because edge 
is dynamic].

Similarly in the tiniest of ways, I didn't weight the library 
situation very heavily in picking D.  I have written a couple of 
bindings (painfully, before I got Dstep to work or knew the 
language very well!) and wrappers and if anyone like me arrives 
subsequently then it will be that little bit easier.  So that's 
one more reason why it can take a couple of decades for something 
to be an overnight success - it takes time for paths and habits 
to be formed, and there are threshold effects, beyond which there 
is a phase change.  So D's long-term prospects will be shaped by 
how it responds to the challenges of growth.  Looks good to me 
right now.


Laeeth.