Moving back to .NET

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 26 September 2015 at 22:19:41 UTC, Laeeth Isharc 
wrote:
> In practice, life is risk, and sometimes you have to take 
> calculated risks to advance - this is true whether or not we 
> acknowledge it to ourselves.  Some people shouldn't even think 
> about using D at work, but that tradeoff depends on their 
> particular situation, what they want to achieve, and what their 
> alternatives are.  You speak in a blanket way, as if you're in 
> a position to know what's right for others.

I am not doing consulting on a forum, I am arguing against the 
viewpoint that the lack of adoption of fringe tools is a result 
of unjustified fear. I wouldn't make any blanket statement for a 
business in any shape or form without talking with them to 
understand their situation. I don't know why you think I am doing 
consulting here.

But risk management is at the core of software engineering. That 
is because there are many unknown factors during development, but 
you have to set the trajectory at an early stage, which includes 
picking the development environment. Software process/methods 
maturity is often quantified in "repeat success". That is, not 
that you have one success, but keep repeating the success over 
many projects.

> attempt to use irrelevant factors to undermine your prestige.

There is no prestige involved. But you seem to assume that 
whatever holds for your field translates well to other fields. 
That is most likely not true. If I started arguing about hedge 
fund managment like you do about programming and engineering you 
would most likely find it tiresome.

I've majored in human factors/software engineering, taught it to 
students and been with a research group where many focused on 
using Latour's actor network theory for understanding 
organizations and systems development processes. Software 
engineering is not a fun or easy topic to teach and also not 
suitable for forum debates unless people have the same background.

This is my key point: People are not avoiding fringe tools 
because they are afraid of progress. Geeks are quite happy to use 
fringe tools in their spare time or for smaller parts of bigger 
projects.

Managers should avoid using unsupported fringe tools for larger 
long running projects, for many reasons. The big players have 
many more options, it means you are more likely able to move and 
make changes later on in the project. Like adopting new platforms 
such as ARM, asm.js etc. With a tool like D you have to be 
prepared to take custody of the compiler/runtime to get the same 
flexibility.

You pick a solution for a project, not a language.