D is crap

[Luís Marques via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 3 July 2016 at 06:23:05 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Thanks for taking the time to write this. Let me see if I can 
> help.

Wow, this was very well handled. Thanks for keeping your head 
cool and answering in a constructive, friendly and informative 
manner. It's even more admirable coming from someone who says he 
used not to be exactly the most "people person" / good boss / 
group leader, or whatever the expression was.

> Sometimes I idly wonder what would have happened if D were 
> available in the 80's. Sort of like if you put a modern car for 
> sale in the 1960's.

I've also thought about that from time to time. I think D would 
have been very "mainstream-successful". Starting from where it 
actually started, I think things have worked out well for D, 
despite its still limited success. Looking back all of these 
years I think that D's marketing mistake was the garbage 
collection. Given its target audience and design trade-offs, I 
believe adoption of the language was disproportionally affected 
by that choice. If D had started with stronger support for nogc, 
even at the cost of delaying some other nice features, I believe 
adoption would have been quite stronger (and more easily 
snowballed) -- irrespective of the actual engineering merit of 
that D variant vs the true D. (it would also have avoided all the 
current piecemeal work of trying to remove GC allocation from 
Phobos, etc.; also, notice that nogc marketing would probably 
have been even more important in the 80s).