D is crap

Chris via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Fri Jul 8 05:46:03 PDT 2016


On Friday, 8 July 2016 at 01:17:55 UTC, Luís Marques wrote:

>> 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).

This is a futile discussion. D is in many respects a "hindsight 
language" as regards C/C++.[1] People naturally lacked hindsight 
back in the 80ies and a lot of D's features would have been 
frowned upon as "Don't need it!" (templates), "Waste of memory!" 
(e.g. `array.length`) etc. And remember computers and computing 
power were not as common as they are today. You were also dealing 
with a different crowd, there are by far more programmers around 
now than there used to be in the 80ies, with different 
expectations. In the 80ies most programmers were either hard core 
nerds (hence the nerdy image programmers have) or people who had 
lost their jobs elsewhere and had gone through re-educational 
programs to become programmers and thus were not really 
interested in the matter.

As for GC, it's hard to tell. When D was actually (not 
hypothetically) created, GC was _the_ big thing. Java had just 
taken off, people were pissed off with C/C++, programming and 
coding was becoming more and more common. Not having GC might 
actually have been a drawback back in the day. People would have 
complained that "Ah, D is like C++, no automatic memory 
management, I might as well stick to C++ or go for Java!" So no, 
I think D is where it is, because things are like they are, and 
"what if" discussions are useless. D has to keep on keeping on, 
there's no magic.

[1] Sometimes I think that D should to be careful not to become a 
language looked on by yet another "hindsight language".


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