A few notes on choosing between Go and D for a quick project

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 16 March 2015 at 08:33:43 UTC, Zach the Mystic wrote:
> I see D attracting *really* good programmers, programmers from, 
> let's say the 90-95th percentile in skill and talent in their 
> field on average. By marketing to these programmers 
> specifically -- that is, telling everyone that while D is for 
> everyone, it is especially designed to give talented and 
> experienced programmers the tools they need to get their work 
> done -- even if you repel several programmers from, say, the 
> 45th percentile or below in exchange for the brand loyalty of 
> one from 92nd percentile or above, it's probably a winning 
> strategy, because that one good programmer will get more done 
> than all the rest combined.

Yep, this is what I meant by my Blackberry analogy earlier in 
this thread.  Blackberry used to own the smartphone market, when 
it was limited to professionals who emailed and texted a lot.  
When the market broadened to include everyone, they decided to go 
the popular route and sell touch-screen phones without physical 
keyboards like everyone else.  It was a disaster, from which 
they're only recently recovering by offering physical keyboards 
again.  I'm not saying it _had_ to fail, only that RIM clearly 
didn't have what it took to succeed there.

Similarly, D's never going to do very well with programmers who 
don't care about the efficiency of their code: simpler, slower 
languages like python or ruby have that niche sewn up.  The best 
we can do is point out that if you're already here for the 
advanced features, it can also be used for scripting and the 
like.  And of course, we should always strive to make things as 
easy as we can for both small and large projects, including 
better documentation.

One day, the tide may turn towards native efficiency again, say 
because of mobile or more people writing code that runs on large 
server clusters, and D will be well-positioned to benefit if and 
when that happens.