Performance is not everything

[Deewiant]

Henrik wrote:
> I found this article on wikipedia today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SISAL
> 
> "SISAL (Streams and Iteration in a Single Assignment Language) is a
> general-purpose single assignment functional programming language with strict
> semantics, implicit parallelism, and efficient array handling."
> 
> On top of automatic parallelism and whatnot, the article claims that it
> outperforms C. Sounds great! So is this the Next Big Language(tm)? Nope. It's
> been around since 1986.
> 
> It reminded me that performance must only be a small part of whether a
> language is widely adopted or not. So what determines whether people start
> using a language? Is it only a matter of inertia, tradition, habit and prior
> investments? Or are there more complex considerations to be taken into
> considerations?
> 
> Why haven't we been writing applications and games in SISAL the last 21
> years? In ten years, will people look back at D and ask themselves the same
> thing or is D:s future different? If so, why?

Here's one possible reason: http://hackety.org/2007/08/15/oneLinersAreCrucial.html

I don't know SISAL, but I doubt you can be productive with it within an hour (or
15 minutes, as suggested). With scripting languages like Python or Ruby, you can.

I'd say that with D, it's the case only if you already know C or C++, maybe also
Java. D isn't a very beginner-oriented language.

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