Why D is not popular enough?

[Solomon E via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 21 August 2016 at 23:07:43 UTC, Solomon E wrote:
>
> The D spec is full of errors, literally, or teasers sometimes.
....
> Erroneous code should be omitted from a spec, or at least 
> clearly marked such as by a red background.
>

I'd like to respond critically to my own silly comment.

It's a great achievement that D has so many features, more 
versatility than C++, and yet the same few pages can serve as 
both the language specification and as the language reference for 
experienced D programmers, and also as an introduction to D 
features for programmers new to D, and include sufficient 
examples of what should cause errors as well as what should be 
valid code. It helps make the language lighter to pick up and 
better maintained than if it had separate long books of official 
information for each of those 5 purposes.

So the complaint that errors should have a "red background" is 
classic bikeshedding about what color to paint the bikeshed. Most 
people don't have any difficulty seeing "// error" at or near the 
end of a line as a clear marker that the whole line is an error 
before they start reading the line as if it might be valid, 
shifting their intuition of what the text is trying to say, then 
have the ending surprise them. Most people don't turn around and 
then think "// ok" is a surprise ending either. Most people don't 
have any difficulty scanning for sets of valid formulas or 
sentences to use, or scanning for sets of errors or mistakes to 
avoid, when incorrect and correct lines are interspersed randomly 
in a reference or textbook.

Most programmers can handle languages that reverse the order of 
"if" statements or the order of declaration and use just as well. 
So putting the indicators of whether a line is an error or 
correct at the end of a line is an arbitrary, harmless choice.

If a significant number of people did have any problem with that, 
it would have been cleaned up already. So obviously it isn't a 
problem and it's just a ridiculous, whiny complaint.