D as a betterC a game changer ?

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Thursday, 28 December 2017 at 02:21:09 UTC, Dan Partelly wrote:
> On Thursday, 28 December 2017 at 01:09:34 UTC, codephantom 
> wrote:
>>
>> But honestly, the best way to learn about a programming 
>> language, is to start using it.
>
> Sure ,  **if** you decide it worth to be learned. And honestly, 
> almost everybody knows that to get better at a task you must 
> perform the task itself.
>
>>
>> So I ask you...what have you written in D lately?
>
> 
> My problem currently is that I have no freaking idea what niche 
> D serves, since as I said I perceive multiple personalities in 
> it. I like a lot in the language, but I do not like that I 
> perceive it as a indecisive language.
>
> This is one of the reasons I asked Walter in this thread what 
> is the future of the language ?
> Where does it to go ? No clear answer yet.

It's a practical language for getting stuff done in a way thats 
plastic, efficient, powerful.

So I think the ecological niche is restricted mostly by 
capabilities of the people using it (it wasn't designed as golang 
was as a restricted and simple language for people who have 
limited experience, though I personally found it easy enough to 
learn), by the tolerance people have for discomfort upfront, by 
the ability to pay upfront costs in wrapping any necessary 
libraries, by the ability to pick your own tools rather than 
needing to persuade others first.  It's not as polished as more 
mature languages. It has fewer targets, so for example it doesn't 
yet have a production ready ARM 64 or web assembly target, and if 
you run it on Alpine Linux, FreeBSD or SmartOS it will probably 
work but you might have some work to do yourself. Embedded 
targets will need you to do work. If it's super important not to 
use the GC probably you will have some work to do.  If you work 
with younger people who expect Python style docs and an abundance 
of Stack Overflow answers you may have some work to do there.

Beyond that, it's pretty good for many things,from scripting to 
applications to numerical code, to systems programming.  That's 
really the point.

It's also especially good as glue because of ctfe and compile 
time reflection.  Pegged and other parser generators mean that 
it's a pretty nice language for writing DSLs in.