D easily overlooked?

Joakim via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sun Jul 16 02:41:33 PDT 2017


On Sunday, 16 July 2017 at 07:25:45 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
> People have DEVELOPMENT needs, before LANGUAGE needs.
>
> In its current state, D is already perfect for some 
> developments (high-performance computing and file processing, 
> etc), but for many COMMON "real world usages", IMHO it's still 
> lagging WAY behind many "inferior" languages in terms of easy 
> of use, and thus immediate usability...
>
> Everything can be done in D with the right amount of effort, 
> but the more effort required, the more clever you need to 
> pickup this language.
>
> And the less people you will convince to use it.
>
> Sorry, but for many less-skilled programmers like me, that's 
> how things work.

Then maybe D is not the right language for you, at least not yet. 
  Any tech goes through several well-defined stages, as I've 
talked about before and you can read about online:

http://forum.dlang.org/post/utmwiveailhkouaeyisf@forum.dlang.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle

There are two aspects to any tech, the fundamental design and how 
it integrates with the rest of the world, ie the libraries and 
ease of use that you miss.  A couple of really smart people can 
work on the fundamental design, but it takes a lot of people 
working over years to add libraries and polish to a programming 
language.

That's why D is only geared towards those niches you list and a 
few others right now: it needs to prove itself there before 
people will invest a bunch of time and money into making it work 
for the rest of the "COMMON real word usages" you miss.  It took 
millions of dollars and years for Java or .Net to build up the 
massive libraries and JIT/GC improvements that made them easier 
for you to use now.

D is not at that stage for many uses yet, certainly not for 
mobile, which I've been working on for years.  D needs to prove 
itself with startups like Weka and OSS projects like Tilix and 
slowly get polished and many more libraries added.  It is 
happening, there's a lot of stuff on dub these days:

http://code.dlang.org

But if you can't wait till that's all done, you can either chip 
in with writing libraries or polishing up the ease of use, or go 
use something else till D's ready for you.


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