At a crossroad

[Clay Smith]

Sjoerd van Leent wrote:
> Lately, I've been tuning in to the development of D again. But what I see is rather disturbing.
> 
> There is a new continuation of the old D, in the newer D2. Personally, I think this is good, as long as there will be a defined end to D2. What disturbs me more, is that there appears to be no coherent development.
> 
> There are all nice ideas, but it appears that one project dies after the other.
> 
> I see a number of problems, which keep D from growing up.
> 
> There appears to be a lack of understanding about whom are going to use the language. D is targeted at the niche of C and C++. Next to D, there are .NET and Java. These are all competitors. Other popular languages, such as Python and Ruby, though being non-system languages, have their share as well. As I look at it, I come to some essential conclusions:
> 
> All of these environments have a stable language, and on top of that, ONE single main library. With C++ this is STL/IOStream, with .NET and Java it's their respective libraries. Similar for Python and Ruby. With D however, there are at least 2 main libraries (Phobos and Tango), whereof Tango doesn't support D2. It is unacceptable for the target audience to find this situation. Tools can't interoperate, libraries can't interoperate, etc.
> 
> There are a lot of ideas for nice tools. But the essential base is missing. For large projects there is the need for a decent IDE and the need for dynamic linking. Although attempts are made, it all appears to stall. There is barely any usable main-purpose library.
> 
> As D2 will be finished hopefully not to long from now, especially the specification, I would really request to start thinking about how to continue. D is a nice language, with great opportunity. But without management, even when it is nice, it will fail.
> 
> I would like to ask everyone interested in getting D up and running for main-stream purposes, to sit together and think about solutions.
> 
> Anyway, I hope I'm not putting too much poison into the newsgroup, but I really needed to say this.

I think the major issue with D is the total lack of funding, and by this 
  I mean

  - Not enough people out there are making money using the D language
  - No funding from any large open source groups

Until more people learn how to get income programming in D and there are 
job posts asking for D experience, D is destined to be a hobby language 
only.

- Clay