If I had my way

[F i L]

On Saturday, 10 December 2011 at 19:23:02 UTC, Andrei 
Alexandrescu wrote:
> Sure, we can label Mehrdad as a whiny baby, but I suspect his 
> experience is representative for the out-of-the-box experience 
> of many others: they see D's cool features, they download the 
> compiler to try it out on their own terms, and as soon as they 
> deviate from what is tried and works, or they combine features 
> in an unusual yet meaningful manner, it all comes unglued.

As a new member myself, I can testify to this.
After stumbling upon D (via TIOBE top 20) I was very excited to 
find an open-source language with a focus on productivity AND 
efficiency. I bought TDPL book and dove in. However, I sunk a bit 
when I realized some features listed in the book where either 
missing or broken.

My biggest disappointment was(/is) with the lack of the alleged 
Pseudo Methods (section 5.9.1). It's one thing to play around 
with a language you understand is growing and under development. 
It's another to boast about the language to your co-workers, only 
to receive unexpected errors when they ask for demonstrations :/
Bad for publicity, that.


With that said, I think 2.057 should be released soon, and major 
bug resolution should be a focus of 2.058. Beyond bugs and 
missing features, D's weakest area with many of my co-workers, 
and with myself, is it's platform support. The company I work for 
chose C#/WPF as foundations of a major product a few years ago 
and now we are paying for that choice with so much of the market 
focused on cross-platform, web, and mobile platforms. Mac OSX 
x86_64 support is very needed in D and I hope Window x86_64 and 
ARM support will be the major focus going forward.

D's ambitions far exceed other languages I've come across and I 
look forward to I'm sure is a bright future for the language.

-Philip