D casually mentioned and dismissed + a suggestion

Chris via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Wed May 13 02:47:29 PDT 2015


On Tuesday, 12 May 2015 at 18:35:10 UTC, FujiBar wrote:
> For those keeping track of every mentioning of D in the media 
> (Hi Andrei!):
>
> The following article about Rust made it to the front page of 
> HN and /r/programming recently: http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0324/
>
> Here is the part mentioning D:
>
> "Well, as you probably remember, it is far not the first 
> attempt to create a "better" C/C++. Take the D language, for 
> instance. It was released in 2001 and is a good language 
> indeed. But there are no vacancies, no decent development 
> tools, no remarkable success stories associated with it. The 
> OpenMW project was initially started in D but then the authors 
> suddenly decided to completely rewrite it into C++. As they 
> confessed, they'd been receiving piles of emails where people 
> would say, "you are making a cool project and we'd like to 
> contribute to it, but we don't know and neither feel like 
> studying this silly D". Wikipedia tells us that there were a 
> lot of other attempts besides D to kill C++ - for example Vala, 
> Cyclone, Limbo, BitC. How many of you have even heard of these 
> languages?"
>
> Walter would probably violently disagree with the "no decent 
> development tools" assessment. But I got to say that people 
> used to Visual Studio and XCode (like myself) not being 
> impressed  by D's 1980s-style bare basic command line tools is 
> not surprising.
>
> I think an IDE, one could call it "DCode" (great name, isn't 
> it?), which integrates all the available tools and provides a 
> modern graphical interface to them would do wonders.
>
> I used to be a command line / text editor / handwritten builds 
> scripts guy myself. But then I was forced to use Visual Studio 
> for a project and now I do not want to go back.

'As they confessed, they'd been receiving
piles of emails where people would say, "you are making a cool
project and we'd like to contribute to it, but we don't know and
neither feel like studying this silly D".'

Yet another reason not to use D. This is a new one to me, though. 
The common mantra is "D needs a cool project", and then when 
someone has a cool project, they say "we won't contribute, unless 
you use a language we all know". How thick is that?!

It's not even worth discussing this attitude. If it was up to 
people who never want any change, don't want to explore things, 
don't want to learn anything new, even if they can see its merits 
right in front of them, we wouldn't have fire for cooking and 
heating, wheels, soap, penicillin, electricity, fridges, punch 
cards - not even C++.


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