D and the world

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
> David B. Held wrote:
>> I think D has a bigger threat from Scala than C#.  Whereas C# is just
>> another Java,
> 
> That was true for the first version of C#, but they've been adding tons
> of high level features ever since.  In version 3, there will be stuff
> like type inferencing, lambda expressions, etc.  LINQ is really cool,
> too, neatly unifying in a typechecked way databases, XML, etc.  There's
> also F#, another .NET language, if you really want to go functional.
> .NET is an awesome platform.  The only problem with it is that it's from
> Microsoft.

This really shows how big a role huge corporation support plays. Few
years ago when I first found D, both C# and Java were more "toy
languages" than what they are now. D had generics and foreach before
Java, now Java has them too, maybe soon it gets true closures before D.
Also C# 3.0 is now leading the way. Extending type inference in D is the
way to go.

The only way to compete with big players seems to be to do those things
right where the predecessors have failed. Legacy code is what slows down
things. None of the other languages seem the offer such a great
combination of metaprogramming facilities and native code generation
than D (maybe C++0x). Also contract programming constructs are
important. Getting contract inheritance and unittests working would help
a lot. It still would not please all the fp folks that prove program
correctness with high level stuff like monads and pure functions, but it
would help practical applications programming.

> 
> http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/Introduction_to_C__3.asp
> 
>> Scala aims to be an academic language
> 
> That's not true.  It comes from an academic environment, but it is
> targeted towards industry.  That's why Scala is byte compatible with the
> JVM and Java libraries.  They also support .NET, but that support has
> fallen behind with the latest versions.
> 
> -Jeff