On D development

bearophile bearophileHUGS at lycos.com
Wed Oct 24 15:10:55 PDT 2012


Andrei Alexandrescu:

> This reasoning is flawed. We're talking about an evolving 
> process, with a lot happening in the past couple of years.

There is no reasoning flaw in looking at a bigger picture than 
just the last two years :-)

In the last years I've seen languages like Go, Scala, Clojure and 
even silly things like CoffeeScript pop out from almost nothing 
and become widely more used compared to D. Today D is not nearly 
as used as Scala.

So I can't tell the future, and maybe D2 will have a glorious 
future, but from the signs I can tell D2 is not having a fast 
spreading. It's a complex language, it requires a good amount of 
time to be learnt (D1 was an important stepping stone to learn 
it, because D1 was simpler) it has significant problems, new 
programmers are more trained in Java and JavaScript and they 
often don't like system languages (and many firms don't need 
system level programs).

Today a system language, even if widely successful, is going to 
be a niche, maybe 100 times less used compared to 
JavaScript-level languages.

So in my precedent post I have suggested to remove our blinders a 
moment and think about what does it means to be "successful". 
There is more than one meaning, as Algol and Haskell show very 
well :-)

Bye,
bearophile


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list