Using D

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 11 July 2014 at 16:54:40 UTC, Chris wrote:
> 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.

It should read It's more mature than _Go_ or Rust, of course.