Using D

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Fri, 2014-07-11 at 16:54 +0000, Chris via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[…]
> 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.

People believed the FORTRAN propaganda, the COBOL propaganda, the Pascal
propaganda. I think we ought to distinguish good marketing from hype.
Java had good marketing, was in the right place at the right time, and
had a huge amount of hype as well.

If Go is better for server things than D then might as well stop trying
to use D at all.

Go was actually designed as a better C with CSP for concurrency and
parallelism.

Go, D, Rust, C++, C, Haskell,… are all just programming languages that
create native code executable. Thus they are all in the same category
regarding potential usage. Everything else is about whether the
programmer likes and uses well, the language.

If Go and Java are closed languages, so is D. All three have open source
repositories and people can submit changes via pull requests. All three
have committees comprising the people who have commit rights to the
mainline and they are the only people who can actually change the
language.

I think I have to repeat the point about irony here regarding
ideology :-)

> 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.

Go folk have exactly the same view and argument regarding Go. Java folk
have exactly the same view and argument regarding Java – well except for
the compiles to native code bit, obviously. ;-)

In the end it is about community rather than the programming language
per se. Java created a huge community that was evangelical. Go has
rapidly created an active community that is evangelical. Python has
rapidly created a large evangelical community. D has slowly created a
small community that hasn't as yet created the outward looking
evangelical aspect. Where are the user groups having local meetings is
my main metric. Java definitely, Go definitely, C++ sort of, D no. This
is the real problem for D I feel. Without local user groups meeting up
you don't get exposure and you don't get traction in the market.

If there were more D users in the London area than one in London and one
in Brighton maybe we could start a London D User Group (LonDUG).
SkillsMatter would host.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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