The Next Big Language

[Walter Bright]

Max Samukha wrote:
> On 10/19/2010 09:06 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Time will tell how long it will take people to become idiomatically
>> proficient in D. But also consider that Andrei's book "Modern C++
>> Design" completely changed the idiomatic way people wrote C++ programs.
>> A 1990's state of the art C++ program is very different from a 2010 one.
>>
>> We've only just begun figuring out the right way to write D programs.
> 
> That is funny. Now and then you and Andrei talk so confidently about Go, 
> C#, Haskell and other D competitors, without having written more than a 
> couple of lines in those languages. At the same time, you are claiming 
> that it takes years to even start to learn a programming language.

I think I claimed that it takes years to master a language, not start to learn. 
I am not a master of Go, C#, or Haskell.

> Sure, 
> it is not problems with D that make it difficult to use. We simply don't 
> know how to program in D yet, after several years of doing just that.

Usage of just about every language has evolved away from what the designers 
originally thought it would be.


> With all due respect for Andrei, I doubt that it is his book that 
> completely changed the way people wrote C++ programs. It was 
> influential, right, but it was really not a single factor. And some of 
> ideas presented in that book are avoided by reasonable programmers.

I'm not the only one that thinks so: 
http://www.artima.com/cppsource/top_cpp_books.html


> Please stop so shamelessly advertising each other. Thanks!

It wasn't an intent to advertise, I was trying to illustrate how the usage 
pattern of a language changes over time. Does anyone think Bjarne Stroustrup 
imagined this stuff back in 1985? or even 1995? Even how people use C has 
changed a lot, despite the language itself hardly changing.