Biggest Issue with D - Definition and Versioning

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 1/17/12 4:52 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 1/17/2012 2:07 AM, Gour wrote:
>> My example was just meant to show what might be the result when one
>> feels that developers are not behind their product in a sense that one
>> 'cannot count on the project' which was supposed to be continuation on
>> my "we always get the feedback it's not safe investment of our time&
>> energy and it would be better to use something else, either C(++), Java,
>> Scala, Python etc."
>>
>> So, I highly admire the work of all members within D community giving
>> something valuable for free, but being interested in success of D, I
>> wanted to share my experience I have when trying to advocate using of D
>> for real (open-source) projects *today*.
>>
>> I'll try to be more sensitive next time...
>
> I'm not taking issue with sensitivity, just that one is *less* likely to
> get responsive bug fixes from Major Software Vendor, and so dismissing D
> for that reason is invalid.
>
> I've seen people say "D doesn't have feature X, so I'm going to use
> language B." But B doesn't have feature X, either. Again, the reason
> given is invalid.

This is often mentioned, so I, too, thought about it a fair amount. I 
think it would be hasty to simplify that judgment.

I think the reasoning goes like this:

1. D lacks feature X that is often needed during the use of language B, 
which lacks it too.

2. The person reasons they'll see advantage in switching to a language 
if it did have X.

3. D doesn't, so the proposition of making the effort to switch from B 
is less appealing.

Similar lines of thinking may go about features that B has and D 
doesn't, or about features that both B and D have but D implements them 
poorly, or about promising differentiating features that D has that 
don't work reliably.


Andrei