A summary of D's design principles

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, September 28, 2010 10:22:09 bearophile wrote:
> Jesse Phillips:
> > This is exactly how it should be marketed. It has the productivity
> > of Python, other dynamic languages, with the performance and power
> > of a natively compiled language.
> 
> Most programmers are able to see that's very false, today.
> 
> The main and maybe only advantage of D over C# is that it's multi-platform.
> But today the Web is very important, and D can't be used in browers.
> 
> I think that if D wants a chance to not die as many other C-inspired
> languages have done in past, Walter needs lot of perseverance and to keep
> slowly improving D for 8-10 more years. When D will be "good enough" maybe
> some people will start to use it. But the implementation of D2 is
> currently far from that point.
> 
> Bye,
> bearophile

Well, there's certainly plenty of more work to be done on dmd, but it won't take 
8 - 10 more years for it reach the point where it's fully stable and feature-
complete and completely reasonable for using in production code. What it really 
lacks in comparison to other languages such as C#, python, Java etc. are 
libraries and tool support. The number of libraries out there for most popular 
languages is enormous. D just doesn't have that (though the fact that it can 
call C, and to some extent C++, definitely helps). Phobos is continuing to move 
forward, and work on tools for D is being done, and at some point we may be 
closer to more established languages, but that will definitely take time, and it 
could very well be 8 - 10 more years before the D ecosystem is really on par 
with that of many popular, more established languages. But it could get there. 
For instance, it's taken years for python to get where it is today. But steady 
growth in usage has gotten it to the point where it's a major and popular 
language.

As it stands, I think that the statements of about D's productivity are true for 
many tasks, but compiler bugs and the lack of libraries (much as both are 
improving) can really take a toll on productivity in comparison to languages 
which are completely stable and have lots of existing library code available. If 
we stick with it, though, we should get there eventually.

- Jonathan M Davis