Where will D sit in the web service space?

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 17 July 2015 at 12:06:08 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Friday, 17 July 2015 at 11:23:28 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>> An attractive platform is which gets the job done, not the 
>> best one, which doesn't actually exist (if it existed, there 
>> wouldn't be a list of options). And it's not like D has 
>> nothing to show, one must consider requirements for his task 
>> to decide which tool to choose and there's no single answer 
>> that suits everyone.
>
> There is always a relatively small set of best solutions for a 
> given problem. One needs to find a rational and obvious answer 
> to the question:
>
> For what domain is D the best choice?

You are switching the question without recognizing this - some 
kind of fallacy of composition.  There may be only a few sensible 
choices in a given hedge fund team at a particular time and 
location.  There aren't only a few sensible choices for hedge 
fund data processing generally.  It's a big world, and there are 
many more variations between the needs of different teams than it 
is possible to imagine.

The work of Austrian economists on entrepreneurship demonstrate 
that it simply is not possible to know which people will use a 
product and how.  The future is unknown, if not unimaginable.  
Who would have imagined a couple of East German PhDs would have 
had such success building a company based on D in a domain that 
didn't quite exist in that form at the time they began, 
particularly given all the complaints about the garbage 
collector.  (The fact that they built their own has no bearing on 
my point).

So it's a spurious question, and would be spurious even if D were 
a product that were sold by a corporation like a manufactured 
product, rather than what it is, which is an organically 
developing language and ecosystem that is heavily influenced by 
its originators yet not controlled by them.

The bigger picture is not D in a death match with any 
identifiable languages.  As Peter Thiel says, thinking of 
yourself as competing is an extremely destructive mindset for 
operating in business.  One wants to carve out a monopoly that is 
earned by doing some set of things uniquely reasonably well.  
Aesthetics matter for programming languages, since programming is 
for the time being a human activity, and so there doesn't even 
need to be a technical superiority (although I think there is).  
The context for all of this is the economics shifting in the 
longer-term towards native code.  If you presume programmer 
productivity is the only thing that matters and treat efficiency 
like a free resource, it's a dead cert that at some point 
efficiency will no longer be free.  I think we are probably at 
that point, and that Facebook's experience with tradeoffs is not 
an edge case, but a leading edge for what more people will 
experience in future.

Furthermore, just rhetorically, gentle and constructive 
suggestions for improvement that come from within are likely to 
be more effective than those that seem to some not to grant D its 
due even when it's difficult to argue from any perspective that 
there's an area it has gotten right.  I do not think I am the 
only one with this sense.

> Just a single, well argued answer that stands up to scrutiny. 
> Without it, few people will feel like endorsing it. (loss of 
> marketing effect)

Opinions are like noses.  Everyone has one.  Not everyone has 
earned the right to speak with authority on every topic.  You 
make an empirical statement about what will happen if things are 
not done your way.  I personally doubt your empirical statement 
because it doesn't align with how things are done in my small 
(and in aggregate not so small) patch of the world, and these 
things must compose for what you say to be true.  Nobody cares 
about whether in theory D is good for an industry; they care 
about whether it solves the particular problems at hand (human, 
cultural, and tacit knowledge questions being an unavoidable 
component of what defines the problem set).  I am not the only 
one in my sector to think that it does, so if I cared about 
social proof - which I do not - I'd feel comfortable enough with 
the decision.