Using D

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 11 July 2014 at 16:22:27 UTC, Russel Winder via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Fri, 2014-07-11 at 15:30 +0000, Chris via Digitalmars-d 
> wrote:
> […]
>> Let's not forget that Go has millions and billions of dollars 
>> behind it and that it is inevitable that the whole internet 
>> will be full of zealots and professional posters who promote 
>> Go as "theeee best thing ever". People. Sheep. Meehhh.
>
> (I think I detect unintended irony in this post :-)

I get the point :-)

> Go, via goroutines, promotes CSP as an approach to application
> parallelism and is therefore a Good Thing™. Don't underestimate 
> the
> power of single threaded processes communicating using channels 
> and no
> shared memory. It is true that any language has zealots, look at
> Fortran, Java, Python, D, but a language should not be judged 
> solely by
> its zealotry level. Well except for JavaScript (aka ECMAScript) 
> of
> course.
>
> […]

I remember Java used to be "theeee" best thing ever. After years 
of using it, however, I found out how restricted the language was 
/ is. Still, it's been a success, because people believed all the 
propaganda. What matters to me is not so much the odd fancy 
feature, it's how well the language performs in general purpose 
programming. Go was designed for servers and thus will always 
have one up on D or any other language at that matter. But could 
I use Go for what I have used D? Not so sure about that. Also, 
like Java Go is a closed thing. D isn't. Once I read about D that 
it shows what can be done "once you take a language out of the 
hands of a committee". Go, like Java, will finally end up in a 
cul de sac and will have a hard time trying to get out of it. Not 
because the language is inherently bad, because it's in the hand 
of a committee. Ideology kills a language. But it doesn't matter, 
because people will use Go or whatever anyway, will _have_ to use 
it.

What I'm taking issue with is that everybody focuses on the flaws 
of D (every language has flaws), which often gives the impression 
that it's an unfinished, stay-away business. It's not. D can be 
used, and I've used it, for production code. It's more mature 
than D or Rust and it is superior to other languages like Java 
(no OO-ideology for example). Mind you, D is a hindsight 
language, which makes it wiser. Does it have flaws? Yes. I come 
across them sometimes. Is there a language without flaws? If 
there is, tell me about it. Talking about hindsight, I've tried 
many different languages, I like D because of what it has to 
offer for general purpose programming, it compiles natively, 
interfaces with C at no cost at all, it has strong modelling 
power, features that users require are added. I may sound like a 
zealot (see "irony"), but I'm not. I'm very pragmatic, D is a 
good tool and, being community driven, there is a real chance of 
making it a fantastic tool. Individual features are not 
everything.