too early for D2 and too late for D1

dsimcha dsimcha at yahoo.com
Sun Apr 17 13:46:03 PDT 2011


On 4/17/2011 2:37 PM, Gary Whatmore wrote:
> In every young language community the first users have to make sacrifices and build the ecosystem. That's how it goes.

While I'm not endorsing the rude tone of the rest of this post, this is 
an extremely good point.  According to Wikipedia, Python is about 8 
years older than D.  I imagine that 8 years ago people were saying the 
same things about Python that they say about D now.  Back then, everyone 
was using Perl for Python's niche and probably (I wasn't a programmer 
back then) saying how Python's ecosystem is too immature, Perl is good 
enough despite its warts, there's so much existing code written in it, etc.

There will always be a tradeoff between using the latest and greatest 
language that the ecosystem hasn't caught up with yet and using an older 
language with tons of legacy baggage, bad-in-hindsight or outdated 
design decisions and great, mature tools and libraries.  D is strongly 
in the former category.  Java and C++ are in the latter.  Python is 
somewhere in between.  Ironically, unlike the real trolls we deal with, 
Gour seems to understand this.  All he's saying is that D2 does not 
embody the tradeoff he wants to make right now.


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