I have a plan.. I really DO

Maksim Fomin mxfm at protonmail.com
Wed Jul 4 20:17:59 UTC 2018


On Friday, 29 June 2018 at 07:03:52 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
> I never ever (I think) did something provocative, something to 
> finally see:
>...<rest text is skipped>

My 5 cents inspired by experimenting with D some years ago.

1. Programming became niche oriented and quite diverse. Writing 
new language requires significant manpower.
2. D manpower is not sufficient for finishing language in low 
level niche. AFAIK Walter estimated manpower around 2013 to be 
equivalent of bus factor of 10. This is not enough to deliver 
stable language, it will always be "tasted as raw" comparing with 
c++.
3. D strategic mistake is ad-hoc design. Some features are added 
or extended and because of complexity result in corner cases 
(this is exacerbated because sometimes backward compatibility is 
preserved and sometimes not). Fixing corner cases sometimes 
produces more questions. As a result language has some mess which 
is unlikely to be fixed coherently (c++ is at least a documented 
mess).
4a. Limited developers' efforts are consumed by fixes and 
internal code optimization rather than important issues.
4b. Dips (related to language design) mostly fail because 
proposal authors do not write code and developers are busy.
5. My view of D future. Walter and developers will continue to 
improve and develop D but at low pace. Low-level niche will be 
dominated by c++ as a common denominator. D and some alternative 
languages would compete for different parts of this niche. In 
long-term low-level niche will be broken into smaller niches with 
languages specializing in them. Being "just low level" would be 
wrong as "just language". This would raise questions what D goal 
is.

I am from area of economic, financial and scientific calculations 
used in decision making. It is dominated by python, c++ and 
statistical software. In most cases it does not require absolute 
speed (except financial markets rt trading, big data processing 
or some hard mathematical problems which are relevant for 
researchers in top institutions with supercomputers). It is hard 
for me to provide arguments for using D (meaning from 
professional area view) because c++ can be used for performance 
and D is poor in statistical libraries. Because it is applied 
area nobody cares whether exceptions have root class or whether 
virtual is default.


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