ESR on post-C landscape

[Joakim]

On Tuesday, 14 November 2017 at 19:48:07 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Tuesday, 14 November 2017 at 04:31:43 UTC, Laeeth Isharc 
> wrote:
>> He mentions D, a bit dismissively.
>> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7724&cpage=1#comment-1912717
>
> Eh, he parrots decade-old anti-D talking points about 
> non-technical, organizational issues and doesn't say anything 
> about the language itself, who knows if he's even tried it.
>
> As for the the rest, the usual bunk from him, a fair amount of 
> random theorizing only to reach conclusions that many others 
> reached years ago: C has serious problems and more memory-safe 
> languages are aiming to replace it, while C++ doesn't have a 
> chance for the same reason it took off, it bakes in all of C's 
> problems and adds more on top.
>
> He's basically just jumping on the same bandwagon that a lot of 
> people are already on, as it starts to pick up speed.  Good for 
> him that he sees it picking up momentum and has jumped in 
> instead of being left behind clinging to the old tech, but no 
> big deal if he didn't.

I thought this was a much better post in that thread, especially 
the last two paragraphs:

"Some may claim that the programming language isn’t the place to 
look for help, but I disagree. If it can prevent language errors 
in the first place (memory management, type systems) and help me 
use available resources (concurrency), and deal with expected 
failure (distribution) then I want it in the flow of the program 
(my description of what should happen), not in some box bolted 
onto the side. And it has to be efficient, because I’ve only a 
few cycles to waste and no IO or memory.

So that’s where I’d look for action in the programming language 
field – not to improve C, an imperfect solution to yesterday’s 
problems; I want something that helps with apps that are big, 
distributed, concurrent, and efficient because those are the more 
important problems people are solving today and in the future."
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7724&cpage=1#comment-1913062

To the extent microservices push in exactly this direction, D 
needs to make an effort there.