Final by default?

[Manu]

On 13 March 2014 12:48, Andrei Alexandrescu
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org>wrote:

> On 3/12/14, 5:40 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>
>> On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 00:18:06 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>
>>> On 3/12/14, 5:02 PM, Chris Williams wrote:
>>>
>>>> As someone who would like to be able to use D as a language,
>>>> professionally, it's more important to me that D gain future clients
>>>> than that it maintains the ones that it has. Even more important is that
>>>> it does both of those things.
>>>>
>>>
>>> The saying goes, "you can't make a bucket of yogurt without a spoonful
>>> of rennet". The pattern of resetting customer code into the next
>>> version must end. It's the one thing that both current and future
>>> users want: a pattern of stability and reliability.
>>>
>>
>> Doesn't this sort of seal the language's fate in the long run, though?
>> Eventually, new programming languages will appear which will learn from
>> D's mistakes, and no new projects will be written in D.
>>
>
> Let's get to the point where we need to worry about that :o).
>
>
>  Wasn't it here that I heard that a language which doesn't evolve is a
>> dead language?
>>
>
> Evolving is different from incessantly changing.


Again, trivialising the importance of this change.

 From looking at the atmosphere in this newsgroup, at least to me it
>> appears obvious that there are, in fact, D users who would be glad to
>> have their D code broken if it means that it will end up being written
>> in a better programming language.
>>
>
> This is not my first gig. Due to simple social dynamics, forum
> participation saturates. In their heydays, forums like
> comp.lang.c++.moderated, comp.lang.tex, and comp.lang.perl had traffic
> comparable to ours, although their community was 1-2 orders of magnitude
> larger. Although it seems things are business as usual in our little hood
> here, there is a growing silent majority of D users who aren't on the forum.


Are you suggesting that only we in this thread care about this, at the
expense of that growing silent majority?

Many of the new user's I've noticed appearing are from my industry. There
are seemingly many new gamedevs or ambitious embedded/mobile users. The
recent flurry of activity on the cross-compilers, Obj-C, is a clear
demonstration of that interest.
I suspect they are a significant slice of the growing majority, and
certainly of the growing potential. They care about this, whether they know
it or not. Most users aren't low-level experts, even though it matters to
their projects.

I want to know what you think the potential or likely future breakdown of
industrial application of D looks like?

I have a suspicion that when the cross compilers are robust and word gets
out, you will see a surge of game/realtime/mobile devs, and I don't think
it's unrealistic, or even unlikely, to imagine that this may be D's largest
developer audience at some time in the (not too distant?) future.
It's the largest native-code industry left by far, requirements are not
changing, and there are no other realistic alternatives I'm aware of on the
horizon. Every other facet of software development I can think of has
competition in the language space.
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