D popularity

[Rob T]

On Monday, 21 January 2013 at 07:20:59 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> On Monday, January 21, 2013 02:01:42 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> D does continue to face an uphill battle for mindshare: These 
>> days,
>> most people who write code prefer to use languages that accept 
>> ANY
>> grammatically-correct code and deliberately remain silent 
>> about all
>> mechanically-checkable problems they can possibly ignore. 
>> Apparently
>> this is because they prefer to manually write extra unittests 
>> so that
>> only a subset of these errors are actually guaranteed to get 
>> caught
>> (if there's any guarantee at all).
>
> In my experience, most programmers don't want to write unit 
> tests, so I
> suspect that the folks who are pushing for less strict 
> languages generally
> aren't testing their code any better than the folks using 
> strict languages
> are. I suspect that the main problem with folks wanting the 
> compiler to just
> accept stuff is that too many of those folks started with 
> scripting languages
> where you don't have compilation errors, because you don't 
> compile anything.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

If the goal is to increase the popularity of D, and if people 
prefer scripted languages over compiled, then a good place to 
start is to create an interpreter for D, thus allowing it to be 
used as a scripted language, and also retain the ability to be 
compiled for optimal performance.

This will _not_ cheapen D, it will strengthen it, because I can 
see plenty of serious programmers using the interpreter for 
faster coding. Later the code can be compiled once the job is 
done or needs to be tested in compiled form. There are also 
perfectly sane use cases for having the ability to embed an 
interpreter directly into an application.

If we can determine what will help move D towards greater 
adoption, and then prioritize what needs to be done to make it 
happen, then we'll move forward faster than just randomly bumping 
around.

--rt