D easily overlooked?

Wulfklaue via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Wed Jul 26 08:55:14 PDT 2017


On Wednesday, 26 July 2017 at 06:40:22 UTC, Bienlein wrote:
> D is the most feature rich language I know of. Maybe only Scala 
> comes close, but Scala can be at times an unreadable mess as 
> the designers of the language valued mixing functional and OO 
> higher than readability. D, on the contrary, has a very clean 
> design througout.
>
> But you are right. D is missing some unique selling point like 
> ease of concurrency using Communicating Sequential Processes in 
> Go or memory safety in Rust without a GC. This is because D 
> does not have a business model, but seems to be seen as a 
> playground for building the greatest language ever. I fear this 
> will not change. Topics of people arguing that D needs a 
> business case pop up regularly here and are every time mostly 
> or also completely ignored. It does not look like this will 
> change, because the main drivers of the language never drop a 
> comment in those discussions.

I noticed the issues for me is going beyond just the language. 
Its also productivity.

Not going to hide that i switched to Pascal. There are some 
features that are needed in my case, where pascal has been 
kicking D's behind in my personal opinion.

One of those has been frankly community support. Lets say there 
is a issue in D and one posts about it here. If your lucky, in a 
few hours there is a response. Then the response can be 
categorized as:

* Friendly / Useful / Solve issue
* Useless off-topic responds that does not answer the question 
but focuses on a complaint and ignores the issue.
* Semi-aggressive answer that indeed solves the issue but one 
feels "intimidated"

I have for a long time have a love / hate relationship with D. 
And the negative feels have  always stemmed from the strange 
community.

Its not just the Pascal community where i feel better, even in 
the Rust / Go community people feel like the have more patience 
or are less judgmental.

Its this strange semi-aggressive that is her, that just feels so 
strange. I can not put my finger on it. All i can say is that i 
do not experience it in the same degree as with D.

Lets say i bring up the issue: Plugin/DLL linking is a bore and 
needs to be more easy. Go made it easier with simply 
"-buildmode=plugin". In Pascal it only takes one keyword 
"library"... I can bring up a lot of topics like this where 
things are more easy in other languages and in D it requires at 
times hours to get something going but lets use this example.

You will get people that agree but then at the same time point 
out:

* Stop complaining about it, we do not have the people to add 
this.
* Why don't you code it into the D source.
* Agree but it will never happen.
* We do not need this.
* Why do you not pay for this feature.

And every topic with a complained or suggestion comes down to 
this.

They recently added Static foreach ... yay ... and i do not care 
a god daim thing because it only adds more C++ upper language 
focus but does not make the language or the platform more easy. 
And boy are people going to be annoyed for me writing this. But 
how about NOT always adding new feature and actually making 
things more easy for new people.

The issue of D is not the pure language but this strange over 
focus on being the next C++ replacement that nobody is asking 
for! There are already a lot of other languages that can do C++ 
things, namely C++!

You want no memory management, you go Rust, Pascal, ... Easy web 
development, Go, Crystal, hell Ruby, PHP. System development: C, 
C++, Rust...

D is trying to win over a market with a mix of language feature 
that make it a master of none. And that shows...

There are just too much things where D is lacking but people 
there is simply a lack of flow.

Can not do X because of lack of money, people.
Can not get more money because we lack X and people.
Can not get more people because we lack X and money.

And the circle keep going while attention is put on language 
feature when the language is already great but the whole sea of 
other issues outside the language get a minimal of attention....

I will not wast too much time on this because i can write on a 
piece of paper and know what the exact responses will be.

And the end result became, i gave up on D. Switch to the freaking 
old Pascal language and got more stuff done in a few days time, 
then the semi-months with D. How strange it may sound. And hell, 
trust me, Pascal there documentation sucks in its 1980s style but 
still its so much more easy to connect the dots. People know my 
opinion on the current D doc system :)  So its not just about 
modern styling and examples...


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list