If D becomes a failure, what's the key reason, do you think?

[Dave]

Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:
> IMO of course,
> 
> Minimalistic D (v.1.0) should appear year ago or so (btw: it was perfect 
> time for D on the market).
> As far as I remember at that time when I started doing Harmonia D was just 
> good enough for v.1.0 (compact and clean)
> 
> All new features appeared after ( inner classes and further ) a) did not 
> change picture in principle, b) did not expand
> feature set dramatically, c) created impression of instability.
> 
> One year of D design more and it will be dead. Our beliefs in D do not 
> matter here.
> Software market laws and psychology are that killers.
> 

IMO, in order for D to "die", there has to be something that would 
supplant it, because I don't think the market for a "better than C & 
cleaner than C++" statically compiled language has died. I'm not aware 
of any language like that out there anyhow, certainly not in this stage 
of development.

That said there are some frustrations recently. What is frustrating me 
the most is this 'immutable as default' thing and the lack of any 
response from Walter on the issue. This would truly be a way to 
differentiate D from C, C++, C#, Java and a host of other languages, and 
Walter has spoken positively about it recently in other public news 
groups, yet he won't even join the discussion here. I mean, if it 
defeats one of the language goals (for instance, if it makes a D 
compiler harder to implement than a C++ compiler) then that's all he'd 
have to say and that would be good enough for me.

Perhaps Walter is completely heads-down right now trying to take care of 
the bug list so he feels comfortable releasing v1.0. The problem with 
that is that I'm getting the feeling that the language spec. itself may 
not be good enough to be the next killer language in the C lineage. 
Something like 'const by default' would at least be worth a try in this 
regard.

Don't get me wrong - D is absolutely great incrementally (one of the 
goals), but IMHO there probably will have to be a major differentiator 
for it to really catch fire.

- Dave

> To D with love,
> 
> Andrew Fedoniouk.
> http://terrainfromatica.com
>