Is D still alive?

[Walter Bright]

Tomek Sowiński wrote:
> Walter Bright napisał:
> 
>> bearophile wrote:
>>> Walter:
>>> 
>>>> The reason that took so long was that few people were using DbC 
>>>> effectively, so it was a low priority. I originally had high hopes that
>>>> DbC would produce dramatic improvements in code quality, but the real
>>>> world results were disappointing.<
>>> After many years and many failed hopes, I think there is no silver bullet
>>> in programming, so maybe nothing is able to produce "dramatic
>>> improvements in code quality".
>>> 
>>> But even if this is true, some things are able to improve coding a bit,
>>> like unit testing, a well semantically defined language, syntax coloring,
>>> quick compile-run cycles, OOP for certain kinds of programs, DbC, and so
>>> on. Each of such things improve the situation only a little, but such
>>> improvements pile up and most programmers when have tried them don't want
>>> to go back to miss those things.
>> Unit testing has produced a dramatic improvement in coding.
> 
> Yes, it's big. Funny that it's not really a technical change but a cultural
> one -- D just leaves no excuses to even the most stone-age programmers not to
> test their code.

I was talking about this with Andrei the other day. D's focus on making it easy 
to do things the right way has paid off handsomely, though this is not at all 
obvious from reading a feature list. It only becomes clear when you use it for a 
while, and then try to go back to the way you were doing things before.

I think one of the reasons DbC has not paid off is it still requires a 
significant investment of effort by the programmer. It's too easy to not bother.