How do you use D?

[Mike Parker via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 6 August 2017 at 06:49:45 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
> For instance, D is my favorite language, and I try to promote 
> it as much as I can (reddit, stackoverflow, even on the go-nuts 
> google groups).
>
> But professionally I still use C++ (#3 TIOBE), PHP (#7), Go 
> (#16) and now Dart (#20).
>
> Not D.
>
> Despite Go and Dart are very recent "post-D" languages, people 
> are already starting to use them a lot these days. Whether you 
> trust or not these "pseudo" rankings, they are probably already 
> more popular than D, despite they are still in their 1.x 
> version.
>
> That's sad, because the same developers who now use Go 
> (including me) could have started to use D instead. But they 
> didn't.
>
> Obviously Google's great support and marketing help a lot, but 
> most developers are not as dumb as you may think.
>

You have to look at the big picture. Let's ignore for a moment 
what might improve D's adoption and perception. Let's also ignore 
this particular moment in time. Let's go back to the beginning 
and look at the big picture from then until now. From that 
perspective, it's quite a rosy picture. We've got a wealth of 
libraries available compared to just a few years ago. 
Conversations on reddit don't immediately descend into D-bashing 
like they used to. I see more new people more frequently in the 
forums than I used to. Multiple companies are using D and talking 
about their usage, sharing their code, where there used to be 
none. It's just a vastly different community than it was when I 
first stumbled into it. Much for the better.

Yes, there are holes to fill, improvements to be made, but there 
always have been and there always will be. It's an ongoing 
process that, by the way, has many more people contributing to it 
than it did a decade ago. It's natural for people to come in 
along the way, look at the current state of affairs (without the 
benefit of that longer perspective -- or even those who do have 
perspective but have lost heart because their major peeves 
haven't been addressed), and start despairing that if only D did 
this or did that, or targeted that domain, or had a plugin for 
that IDE, or whatever, then it would be a better choice than Rust 
or Go or Javascript and more developers would pick it up. That 
might even be true. But the thing to remember is that neither the 
language nor the community has stagnated. Progress is going 
steadily forward despite all the predictions of doom and gloom 
(which I've been seeing in these forums since 2003). And if 
everyone in the community would pick a pet peeve to fix, whether 
it be making edits to the web site or contributing to an IDE 
plugin, it all moves that much further forward. As long as we 
keep our heads down and keep chipping away, things will only 
continue to improve.