Moving back to .NET

Chris via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Tue Sep 29 10:33:02 PDT 2015


On Tuesday, 29 September 2015 at 05:52:13 UTC, Ola Fosheim 
Grøstad wrote:

> This logic is very difficult to follow. Software project 
> management is often done by people who are programmers. From a 
> project health point of view D2 suffers from the same issues as 
> C++, the language feature set makes it easy to create a mess, 
> and therefore the demands of investments in the development 
> process gets higher.

You can create a mess in any language. Having written significant 
amounts of D code, I can tell you that D is very good at avoiding 
a mess.

> This aspect is one significant reason for why languages like Go 
> and Java are getting traction.

Which confirms what I've observed. People prefer set menus, rules 
and strict guidelines - and D seems not to appeal to them due to 
the lack of an ideology.

> Geeks have no trouble picking up new languages, C++ programmers 
> most certainly will have no trouble picking up D. The semantics 
> are too close, but D2 does not solve C++'s issues, and brings 
> another set of issues that C++ does not have. This is not a 
> fear issue. It relates directly to qualitative issues.

This is not my impression. Even "geeks" don't touch D (I know 
this from personal experience), even when there's no risk 
involved, e.g. when writing a small internal tool. As soon as 
they hear they have to learn about ranges and map!(a => 
to!string(a)) and the like, they lose interest. Fear or plain 
laziness ("couldn't be ar*sed"), one of the two. "I certainly 
won't learn D" is a comment I've heard myself.

> Projecting "fear" onto professional decision making is just a 
> way to make excuses for D's shortcomings.

The shortcomings D has wouldn't even interest the majority of 
those who reject D. They wouldn't get deep enough in their daily 
tasks to find out.

> Sun was a big player in IBM's core market and the Java design 
> was very orthodox. Risk is certainly the single most important 
> factor for avoiding change. If you change your core toolset you 
> also will have to change the process and infrastructure.

You've said it again. Java's design is orthodox, so IBM embraced 
it. Again, people prefer simple set menus, rules and strict 
guidelines. It's more of a psychological thing than objective 
risk aversion.


> You are assuming that technologists have timid attitudes 
> towards playing with new technologies. That is not true. Most 
> technologists I know of find that fun. Adopting tech for your 
> personal use or for small tools is one thing, adopting it for 
> deployment is a completely different issue.

See my answer above about "geeks".

> What tools can D successfully replace? Give a focused answer to 
> that and you can improve on D to a level where it becomes 
> attractive.

One example that come immediately to mind is data processing in 
Python. A lot of it is parsing and counting which is much faster 
and often easier to do in D/Phobos.

> But keep it real. Fear among programmers is not D's main issue.

I think it is. It took me a while to realize this. Why is there 
this passionate hostility towards D? I don't go to a Go or Rust 
forum to tell them that I don't like this or that feature and 
that it's all crap. I've decided they're not the right tools for 
what I need and that's it.
> That's just an excuse.




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