Where will D sit in the web service space?

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

The finance guys seem to be coming on board, the Dconf '15 talk 
by the fund guy, Smith, probably helps.  I thought this was a 
nice endorsement recently, a reddit comment by a high-frequency 
trader which ended with:

"[W]e've loved D so much that we're in the middle of a full 
rewrite from C++11 to D. The productivity boost is absolutely 
worth it."
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3cg1r0/lessons_learned_writing_a_filesystem_in_d/csvyxn8

While you may be right from a marketing and strategy perspective 
that D would be better off to focus on some carefully chosen 
niche and try to excel there to begin with, D is a 
general-purpose, native language developed by random volunteers 
from an online community of users.  Even if the community agreed 
with your concept of focusing D on some domain, it's hard enough 
to get most people in a _company_ to agree on what that plan 
should actually be, let alone getting this free-floating 
community to agree on a domain.

And as I've said before, focusing on a domain means you optimize 
for it, which inevitably means you become less general.  Php has 
proven to be highly optimized for the web programming domain, in 
that it is highly successful at being chosen for many web 
projects, but almost nobody would want to use it for anything 
else, for a variety of reasons, but mainly that the qualities 
that make it successful on the web hurt it in other domains.  So 
your superior marketing/business strategy has its technical and 
strategy downsides too, at least for a general-purpose language.

Now, you can argue that the market for programming languages has 
become highly fragmented and that unless you are _the_ language 
for statistics, R, or concurrency, erlang, you cannot get 
anywhere.  But some of us think general-purpose, native languages 
are coming back, with mobile made up only of native/AoT-compiled 
languages these days and successful web properties moving all 
their high-volume backend work to such languages.  Even if the 
pendulum doesn't swing all the way back as far as we think it 
will for general-purpose native languages, that's a very large 
niche, one with few choices- C, C++, D, Rust, Go (the first two 
legacy)- and well worth competing in.

> Ask yourself: why did a weird language like Erlang grow?

It has certainly had a resurgence in recent years, but has it 
really gone anywhere?  Certain highly concurrent apps, like 
Whatsapp, have made good use of it, but it's not like it's 
roaring past D.  If your only point is that it's done better than 
it has a right to because it has a very specific strength, I'll 
point out that it's also a good example of what I said above: 
focusing on one area can leave you significantly weaker in many 
other areas and doom you to that one niche.