Discussion about D at a C++ forum

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Mike Parker" <aldacron at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:jebhmg$20vf$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 1/8/2012 3:57 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On Saturday, January 07, 2012 22:19:53 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> Here's an interesting discussion that may reflect the perceptions and
>>> misperceptions about D within the larger community.
>>>
>>> http://www.cplusplus.com/forum/lounge/58832/
>>
>> Not exactly the most informed discussion. But I would expect that some of 
>> the
>> misinformation is fairly typical. I'd say that a lot of what people think 
>> or
>> know about D is from a couple of years ago (if not farther back) and/or
>> derived from the opinions of others rather than real experience. And an
>> initial bad experience (as has happened far too often, as we've seen with
>> newbies reactions to stuff not working just around here, let alone in the 
>> D
>> community as a whole) can definitely lead to negative and/or misinformed
>> beliefs, which then spread to others outside the D comunity when D is 
>> brought
>> up.
>>
>> I'm not sure what we can do about that other than really improving what 
>> we
>> have to offer, and while we still have plenty to do, we've definitely 
>> been
>> making solid improvements.
>>
>> - Jonathan M Davis
>
> Unfortunately, there's nothing anyone really can do about it (and I'm not 
> actually directing this post at you, Jonathan, just preaching in general). 
> Java, for example, *still* suffers from the reputation it gained back in 
> the late 90's. You have companies like Sony running successful online 
> games with both the client and the server developed in Java, while around 
> the net people are swearing up and down that it's too slow for games. 
> There are issues with Java, sure, but modern JVM performance is perfectly 
> acceptable (and then some) for a significant number of use cases.
>

While that's certainly a real phonomenon, in the case of Java, I think 
there's much more involved than just that: With Java, there's actual 
*reinforcement* of the "Java is slow" (regardless of whether right or 
wrong), and there are also other reasons for not wanting to give Java 
another chance regardless of it's speed. Consider this:

People start hearing "Java's fast now!". The subset of non-Java-users who 
*haven't* already become fed up with Java's OO-religiousness and other 
issues might actually give Java another chance. When most people think "Java 
development", they think "Eclipse". So they grab Eclipse, fire it up, 
and..."holy hell, this is still slow! WTF are people talking about? Java's 
not fast now!" And then they'll leave with a reinforced belief that Java is 
still slow and Java fans are nuts. Note that in this scenerio, whether or 
not Eclipse is an accurate representation of Java's speed is irrelevent.

I think the take-away is this: While we certainly should keep moving 
forward, improving things, correcting misconceptions of D when possible, and 
accepting that there will always people with outdated ideas of D, we should 
also keep an eye out for ways in which we might be accidentally reinforcing 
misconceptions (whether right or wrong), *especially* to those people who 
actually give us a try.

And I do think it also helps that the language we have is just simply much 
better than Java anyway (less likely for people to be fed up with the 
langauge and leave in disgust in the first place - language shortcomings are 
known to be harder to fix than tool shortcomings).