D easily overlooked?

[Bienleine via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 26 July 2017 at 15:55:14 UTC, Wulfklaue wrote:
> 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.

I think I understand what you mean. You have to take into account 
that D is a pure spare time effort. As such it is an incredible 
language. The Go dev team has at least 5 people working on it 
full time and have a big big company behind it. Now compare D to 
Go and you can see how enormous the achievements of the D people 
are given their endowment situation to the one of the Go team.

To me D is a great language and tool to create things in my spare 
time. It is also a great toll for university people that work on 
some research stuff. Developing commercial things with D is a 
different thing. You can still do this, but then you need to be 
aware that D cannot have the same rigour as some tool with a big 
company or a big industry behind it.