[Semi-OT] I don't want to leave this language!

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Wednesday, December 07, 2016 02:38:50 bpr via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> On Tuesday, 6 December 2016 at 22:47:34 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
> > We get plenty of folks who aren't big C/C++ programmers who are
> > interested in D. Yes, the majority seem to have a C++
> > background, but we also get folks from C#, python, ruby, etc.
>
> It would be nice to see a breakdown. From where I sit, it appears
> that most of the interest in D is from C++ users, and it doesn't
> appear that D popularity is rising so much. Any data that belies
> that sad assessment?

As I understand it, the downloads have been increasing year over year. At
least some years, Andrei has given some statistics on the state of D in his
dconf talk. And per his stats, forum/newsgroup activity was going up too,
though I get the impression that at least in the main newsgroup, it may have
actually dropped off (whereas Learn seems like it's been growing). That's
just my impression though. I'm sure github activity has gone up over time
though.

It's my understanding that D's usage has continued to grow but that it isn't
growing super fast, whereas languages such as Go and Rust do seem to have
grown very quickly (probably at least in part due to the companies behind
them). But other languages have taken a long time to catch on and still
ended up being very successful with large user bases (e.g. that's what
happened with python).

It's also hard to gauge how much D is really being used. The number of
companies saying that they're using D seems to have increased, but there are
who-knows how many folks using D who haven't said anything, and we really
don't have much to go on besides the downloads, which only capture a portion
of the D's users and even then only tells you how often dmd was downloaded,
not how many people it was or if they're new users or whatnot. And
downloading dmd from dlang.org is not the only way to get it.

There are definitely things that we can be and should be doing to improve
D's traction (like better supporting @nogc in Phobos), but I don't think
that we're doing badly. And often, the problem seems to be more of a PR one
than anything technical (e.g. I think that we're finally pretty much beyond
the issues caused by the confusion over Tango vs Phobos in D1, but it took a
long time). And honestly, much as there are technical problems related to
the GC, the far bigger problem seems to be the PR issues related to it.
Sadly, the simple fact that we _have_ a GC has been a PR problem, regardless
of the actual state of things. But regardless, we do seem to be gaining
traction, even if it's not as quickly as we might like.

- Jonathan M Davis