D vs Go in real life

[Russel Winder]

On Wed, 2013-11-06 at 08:26 +0100, Paulo Pinto wrote:
[…]
> I rather use D than Go, but it has more to do with Go's community 
> with their religion decisions about generics, dynamic loading, 
> exceptions, enumerations, package management than anything else.

I find the Go community excellent. The mailing list is only a small part
of the community. Try coming to one of the monthly Go user group
meetings in London.

All communities are "religious". This D community takes religious
decisions just as much as the Go, Scala, C++, etc. ones. The position on
generics is not strange if you understand the Go language, it's
computational model and philosophy. Go is taking a non-standard
position, but it is not wrong, it just means that approaches to
algorithms you would take in Ada, C++, D, Rust, Java, Scala, etc. do not
apply directly to Go. It is a shift of mindset and view. If this doesn't
work for you, fine.

> The language follows the Pascal tradition of type declarations 
> and safety before performance dirty tricks. I find quite 
> appealing its Oberon and Alef/Lingo influences.
> 
> It is good enough for many cases where people, wrongly, still use 
> C. For example, the complete UNIX user space.
> 
> Now for those of us that have become used to the niceties the 
> mainstream languages have adopted from academia in the last 30 
> years, Go feels a bit too light.

But for those people seeking a native code language coming from Python,
Go is a breath of fresh air where D, C++, etc. are claustrophobic
language stuck in the attitudes of the 1970s.

> Anyway on my day job, we will not be moving away from JVM/.NET 
> world any time soon.

You and most of the rest of the world. This is why Java 8, Ceylon,
Kotlin, and Groovy (not to mention Clojure) on the one hand and C# and
F# (not to mention VB) are way more important for most programmers than
C, C++, D, Go, Rust.

-- 
Russel.
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