Andrei's list of barriers to D adoption

[Yura via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 02:20:52 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Andrei posted this on another thread. I felt it deserved its 
> own thread. It's very important.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> I go to conferences. Train and consult at large companies. 
> Dozens every year, cumulatively thousands of people. I talk 
> about D and ask people what it would take for them to use the 
> language. Invariably I hear a surprisingly small number of 
> reasons:
>
> * The garbage collector eliminates probably 60% of potential 
> users right off.
>
> * Tooling is immature and of poorer quality compared to the 
> competition.
>
> * Safety has holes and bugs.
>
> * Hiring people who know D is a problem.
>
> * Documentation and tutorials are weak.
>
> * There's no web services framework (by this time many folks 
> know of D, but of those a shockingly small fraction has even 
> heard of vibe.d). I have strongly argued with Sönke to bundle 
> vibe.d with dmd over one year ago, and also in this forum. 
> There wasn't enough interest.
>
> * (On Windows) if it doesn't have a compelling Visual Studio 
> plugin, it doesn't exist.
>
> * Let's wait for the "herd effect" (corporate support) to start.
>
> * Not enough advantages over the competition to make up for the 
> weaknesses above.

Hello,

I have to stress I am beginner in programming, mainly interested 
in number crunching in academia (at least so far). I started to 
write a small project in D, but had to switch to C for few 
reasons:

1) Importance for my CV. I know Python, if I add also C - it 
sounds, and could be useful since the C language is, apart from 
the other reasons, is popular and could help me wit the future 
job, both in academia and industry, since there are many C/C++ 
projects.

2) The libraries - in the scientific world you can find 
practically everything which has already been coded in C, => many 
C libraries. To link it to be used within D code requires some 
work/efforts, and since I am not that confident in my IT skills, 
I decided that C code calling C libraries is much safer.

3) For C - a lot of tutorials, everything has been explained at 
stack overflow many times, huge community of people. E.g. you 
want to use OpenMP, Open MPI - everything is there, explained 
many times, etc.

4) The C language is well tested and rock solid stable. However, 
if you encounter a potential bug in D, I am not sure how long 
would it take to fix.

5) Garbage collector - it will slow my number crunching down.

Please, do not take it as criticism, I like D language, I tried 
it before C and I find it much much easier, and user friendly. I 
feel it is more similar to Python. On the other hand C++ is too 
complex for me, and D would be the perfect option for the 
scientific community, if the above points would be fixed somehow..

Best luck with your work!