Python vs D [ was Re: Bartosz about Chapel ]

Andrei Alexandrescu SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Thu Nov 10 06:45:44 PST 2011


On 11/10/11 2:01 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
> Without a properly financed and orchestrated marketing campaign to push
> D out there to the C, C++ and Fortran crowd and/or a group of people who
> could be the "killer audience", and then for there to be serious take
> up, D remains a 10+ year old niche experiment with no mainline future.

That would help, but I'm not sure that that would be a necessity. There 
are languages that are doing well without massive marketing (Perl, Ruby, 
Python).

> I am now getting more and more requests for Python training from hard
> core C++ folk, they are not asking for D training.  So on current
> statistics Python is successful and D is not.
>
> I would be very happy to have to construct D training courses because
> there was a good client base.  On current evidence I won't hold my
> breath.

I'm offering training on D in addition to C++ and Machine Learning, but 
so far there were no requests for D.

Anyhow, I think you're making good points (quite self-evident to me). 
One simple amend I'd make is that at the end of the day clearly D must 
be a solid technical offering (something that we've recently made very 
good progress on), and inevitably the quality of the language, 
libraries, and tools, will be compared against competing languages. 
Slagging off other languages for not doing e.g. concurrency or generics 
as well as D does would be a mistake, but presenting concurrency or 
generics as differentiating features of D is definitely a good thing to do.


Andrei


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