Moving back to .NET

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 29 September 2015 at 17:33:04 UTC, Chris wrote:
> 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.

I found this too, but would you care to elaborate on why 
specifically you think this is?  (I think it's perhaps not one 
big thing, but lots of little things.  One thinks almost of Isiah 
Berlin's Fox vs the Hedgehog - grand conceptual narratives vs 
vast knowing many little related things).  Small frictions have 
big consequences in the world we inhabit, and perhaps for that 
reason it's easy to underestimate the benefits of things that 
superficially seem to be nothing new.

>> 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.

That's also just a matter of time because there isn't much 
written on blogs etc.  (Not necessarily an ideology, I hope, but 
perhaps a culture of how to do things that is easier to perceive 
from the outside).  I think in a strange way the 2008 crisis was 
the beginning of the end for ideology - people are waking up and 
you can see it beginning to unleash this very creative new era.

> 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.

Probably right today.  As a student of social trends though, it's 
funny how things shift though in ways that are utterly surprising 
and yet far from unpredictable if you are looking clearly and 
closely.

>> 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.

Yes - see Andy Smith.  That's partly my own use too.  It's so 
much more pleasant to know that straight not particularly clever 
code I write will be reasonably efficient, and isn't hard to make 
efficient with a bit of effort from someone else.  Plus no 
dealing with runtime dependencies.  (If you think the D 
experience on Windows is subpar, try installing some python 
libraries - it doesn't always 'just work' in my experience, and 
the ready-made distros are great till you run into a snag).

I'm amazed not to see more discussion of the implications for 
relative trends in storage, network bandwidth, data generation vs 
memory bandwidth (and to an extent memory speed and CPU power).

I was searching for something the other day and came across some 
unix forum posts from 2006.  Apparently, a 1Tb SSD then cost more 
than a million bucks (maybe 1.5).  Looks like I can get one for 
not much more than 500 bucks today from Amazon.  The world hasn't 
yet adjusted to a 2,000 fold reduction in price.  If one 
struggles with python today with ordinary sized data sets, I 
wonder how things look in a decade?  (Which is why I asked if 
Facebook is an edge case or Gibson's unevenly distributed future).


>
>> 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 is certainly a puzzling feature of the world, one for which 
I don't have any answer.  I have noticed that people trying to 
achieve something difficult must often endure relentless 
criticism.  (Pick your favourite reform-minded political leader 
of the past viewed favourably today and go back and read the 
press of that time).