Lost a new commercial user this week :(

[Manu via Digitalmars-d]

On 17 December 2014 at 20:34, Chris via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday, 17 December 2014 at 09:48:43 UTC, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
>>
>> On Wednesday, 17 December 2014 at 09:34:45 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> To start using D effectively in production one needs to stop considering
>>> himself a customer. This is absolutely critical.
>>
>>
>> This is a very interesting point: thanks you.
>> ---
>> Paolo
>
>
> I second this, it's a very good point. The customer attitude permeates this
> whole thread. D is not a framework for very specific tasks in limited
> domains like node.js. Is is a programming language that can be used to build
> frameworks (like e.g. vibe.d) If you only need a feature or two for a web
> project (as the 20-30 lines of JS that were mentioned suggest), you probably
> shouldn't use vibe.d. Only if you want to create something bigger, build an
> infrastructure from scratch say, or need high performance, should you
> consider vibe.d, which does have a certain learning curve, no doubt about
> it, as does D. I use vibe.d now but before I started to use it, I had tested
> it for a while to see, if it suited the project, which included playing
> around with it in my spare time. I did this with other D projects too.

I think you've missed my entire point.
The summary is this:
Tried D, tried a very popular and often hyped D library/framework,
encountered bugs. There was friction along the way which undermines
confidence, but the critical point, the thing that caused the call to
be made, was that the debugger didn't work, and we were unable to
diagnose the bug with relative ease.
It's possible that wouldn't have inspired the call to be made if it
weren't for the prior friction... ie, if it were the first point of
friction, we might have persevered through that one, but the aggregate
prior to that point painted a clear picture, and that was the
proverbial straw.

Immaturity in the language seemed to allow for greater tolerance than
immaturity in the tooling.
This is the experience I was trying to convey... which was to be taken
as a case study, that is all.


> I don't think it's a good idea to tell people about how great D is and then
> throw them right into it without any preliminary training. It is, after all,
> a fully fledged programming language, not an API for certain tasks like
> querying a web server. A language like D has to be _learned_, concepts have
> to be _understood_, even if you are already familiar with C++, Java or C#.

Again, you completely missed the problem. I haven't said anywhere that
the language itself raised any particular issues.
It was the *tooling*. There were also numerous complaints about the docs.


> The same is true of any of the more complex languages. I bet you that,
> regardless of how good the infrastructure may be, you couldn't just sit down
> and hack away without knowing the language, be it Java, C# or C++, no matter
> how much you already know about programming. If you did hack a web server
> together quickly, I'd be worried about the quality of the code.

I would happily challenge that bet.
I've learned Java, C#, python, js, lua, ..., by being told to get a
task done at work; expected to learn the languages within minutes and
produce a solution.
I never had any problems with this in the past.

The only language I've ever 'learned' was C, and that was 15-20 years ago.


> JS and Python are "quick and dirty" languages in the sense that they were
> designed for people who are not really into programming, but want to get a
> task done quick (and dirty if needs be). You cannot compare them with D.

I can and I did.