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[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Sat, 2014-07-12 at 15:41 +0000, Dicebot via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[…]
> Sorry but I am tired of endless appeal to history / usage - by 
> this logic Java and PHP are very good languages full of wisdom. 
> And if someone thinks so we will have a hard time agreeing about 
> anything.

Why are you tired of this? History is extremely useful for learning and
moving forward. Maybe PHP is an aberration designed to allow broken
websites, but many still like it and use it successfully. That PHP and
all sites using it should be replaced is seemingly agreed, but
conservative management and some developers are unprepared to take risks
by replacing that which works. Java may have its faults and it may have
gained traction due to massive over-hyping (*), but it does have good
stuff in it (**). Java evolves and improves in order to stay relevant.
Of course conservative management and a lot of developers refuse to
consider a move away from Java as they have systems that work and are
unprepared to consider reimplementation. Backward compatibility then
becomes an obsession to the detriment of programming language evolution
at the bleeding edge. Java suffers this very badly. Kotlin, Ceylon and
Scala are trying to achieve forward movement but are not getting the
mindshare they deserve. Groovy can be seen as a set of hacks to make
creating systems which are Java based nice to write and maintain.

> Inertia will keep everyone using this feature with no complaints 
> but problems remain : coupling compiler with rather complicated 
> fetching/caching infrastructure, lack of centralized registry to 
> verify contributions, version control. Regarding latter I find it 
> quite telling that dub has recently banned usage of ~master as 
> dependency version and only allows explicit tags/releases - good 
> hygienic decision for growing ecosystem.

I suggest that finding ways of dealing with the issues rather than
running away from them is what should happen. As an emergent property
Maven Central has become the central repository for all JVM artefacts.
Maven though failed to really do the job of being a project build and
management system. Gradle is doing a lot better job. Similarly JUnit3 →
TestNG → Spock also ScalaTest, Cucumber, etc. has shown that inertia can
be overcome by providing something that is compatible and yet provably
better. 

So what is the inertia breaker to get Fortran, C and C++ folk to use D?
I have no idea, but unless there are active user local groups
evangelizing D nothing will change. This email list is important as a
central exchange mechanism, but it is useless for marketing and
evangelizing. 


(*) Trust me on this there was massive over-hyping of Java in the 1994
to 2001 period, I was an indirect part of it.

(**) Though there is a lot of crap, such as claiming to be
object-oriented when clearly it isn't; object-based maybe, but
definitely no object-oriented. 
-- 
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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