Is D still alive?

[Walter Bright]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 1/27/11 8:02 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Although this might as well be true, I generally try to avoid such 
> arguments. The problem with it is it's non-falsifiable 
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability) so it has a certain stench 
> coming with it.
> 
> I've seen such a claim in Go fora: you know, once you get to really use 
> Go, you won't feel the need for generics. Meh.
> 
> I try to _never_ use such an argument. If I'm to convince anyone that D 
> rocks, it won't be by means of unfalsifiable statements.

I agree it's a worthless argument to use to try and convince people to give D a 
try. But for experienced D users, it is an interesting point.


> It will be by 
> showing code that knocks your socks off. The kind of code that makes you 
> think: "If I'm to write that in language X, I need to give away 
> desirable traits A, B, and C. Damn!"
> 
>> 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.
> 
> One issue with DbC is that its only significant advantage is its 
> interplay with inheritance. Otherwise, scope() in conjunction with 
> assert works with less syntactic overhead. So DbC tends to shine with 
> large and deep hierarchies... but large and deep hierarchies are not 
> that a la mode anymore.

Yes, you might be right.