C++ to catch up?

[Don via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 1 February 2015 at 23:20:15 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> On Monday, 5 November 2012 at 18:20:23 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
> wrote:
>
>> The closer that C++ gets to D, the less interested that many 
>> people will be in adopting it, particularly because of the 
>> large user base and the large amount of code out there that 
>> already uses C++. Programmers have to be convinced to  move to 
>> D, and for many C++ programmers, the improvements to C++11 are 
>> enough  to make a move to D not worth it, even if D is a 
>> better language.
>
> (He goes on to point out that nonetheless D will always have 
> the edge because legacy and installed base).
>
> One should be careful about superficial translation of 
> instances from the purely commercial world to the world of 
> languages, but it strikes me that Clayton Christensen's 
> Innovator's Dilemma does apply somewhat to the case of D vs its 
> peer languages.  His central point is that in the beginning 
> disruptive innovation very often tends to commence as a niche 
> thing that may well be globally inferior - he uses the example 
> of Honda motorbikes that allowed them to gain a foothold, and 
> that once they dominated this niche and gained succour from it 
> were able to use to expand their footprint to the extent that 
> they posed a serious threat to the established dominant 
> players.  But for many years, these (and later the cars) were 
> seen as products of clearly inferior quality that had the 
> advantage of being cheap.
>
> The interesting thing is the emotional aspect of perception - 
> nobody would have taken you seriously had you predicted in the 
> early stages that Japanese auto makers would become what they 
> subsequently became.  And one could have pointed out some 
> decades after the war ended that they had been in the business 
> for years, and why should anything change.  This is exactly 
> what people say about D - it's been around forever and hasn't 
> taken off, so why bother.  (see recent Slashdot thread for an 
> example of this).
>
> It is a basic insight of gestalt psychology that perception is 
> shaped by emotion (really it's affect, which goes much deeper - 
> emotion is the tip of the affect iceberg), and one way to know 
> when this is occurring (my background is as an investor and 
> speculator, so I have devoted a couple of decades to applying 
> this in a practical way) is that on the one hand you have an 
> emotional intensity out of proportion to the importance of the 
> topic, and on the other the reasons people put forward to 
> justify how they feel are observably not in accordance with the 
> facts.  See the Slashdot thread...
>
> So in any case, D is not competing on price, but has other 
> strengths that are of very high appeal to a certain group (if 
> you want to write native code in a productive way) even though 
> one must honestly acknowledge its imperfections in a global 
> sense - reading back through the forums a dozen years, this 
> seems to occur quite regularly in waves.  "When is D going to 
> be finished?" even a decade back.  To be upset by the 
> imperfections is missing the point, because languages - even 
> programming languages - have a certain innate pattern of 
> development (that resembles Goethe's observations about the 
> metamorphosis of plants) that can't be forced, no matter how 
> much one grumbles or stamps one's feet.
>
> Furthermore, people tend to extrapolate superficial trends even 
> though history tells us this is a poor guide to the future.  
> Japanese cars really took off once crude exploded in the early 
> 70s (and again towards the end), and auto-makers were slow to 
> respond.  Perhaps they did not organize their business on the 
> basis of a prediction abuot energy prices, but the point is 
> they were ready to take advantage of this shift when it 
> occurred.
>
> I do not want to attempt to be a pundit, but it is interesting 
> that the notable use cases of D - at Sociomantic, Adroll, and 
> Facebook are all aligned with certain salient and very powerful 
> underlying technological drivers and trends.  It's no longer 
> true in many applications that programmer time is expensive 
> compared to machine time, and large data sets encountering the 
> challenges of memory vs CPU trajectories create new challenges 
> and require new approaches.  And it is a positive for D that 
> some of its competition does not take D seriously at this stage 
> - one thinks for example of Guido and his insistence that 
> execution speed ought not to be a factor given work is I/O + 
> network bound, even though this is less true for numerical 
> computing and some kinds of data crunching.  (Not that D is 
> mature here, but there is much that can be done within the 
> existing framework).
>
> In any case, dissatisfaction channeled in a constructive 
> direction is a positive thing, because it is the opposite of 
> complacency and is the edge of the challenger.  The point isn't 
> how people feel, but how they respond to the challenges in 
> front of them.
>
> As a newcomer, it is very satisfying to see the progress made 
> on documentation, ecosystem, and C++ integration and I have 
> quite some respect for the difficulty of the roles of Walter 
> and Andrei.  One is so short of time and attention, and no 
> matter how hard one works and, whatever decisions one makes, it 
> is impossible to keep everyone happy.  If one isn't being 
> criticized, one isn't doing it right.  (Which is not to say 
> that some of the criticisms will not have merit).
>
> Here is a table from an article exploring Christensen's ideas.  
> There are some resonances with past and current questions in 
> the development of D, although as I said one can't map things 
> perfectly because it's a different situation.  And the original 
> book is better than what has been written based upon it.
>
> [Table doesn't format well, but you can see it here.  The 
> surrounding text is less relevant].
> http://recode.net/2014/01/06/the-four-stages-of-disruption-2/
>
>
>
> Laeeth.

Excellent post. This situation is very obvious to us at 
Sociomantic, as we're at the forefront of a massive disruption 
that is happening in the advertising industry. D has far better 
prospects in disruptive technology, rather than trying to compete 
with incumbents in the rapidly disappearing traditional desktop 
market.

And when I read this:

"First published in 1997, Christensen's book suggests that 
successful companies can put too much emphasis on customers' 
current needs, and fail to adopt new technology or business 
models that will meet their customers' unstated or future needs" 
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

I thought: "they put too much emphasis on backwards 
compatibility" ...