Go 1.9

[Wulfklaue via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 09:35:56 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
> With all due respect, on the contrary I think that promoting D 
> as a general purpose programming language could be its only 
> chance to really improve its popularity, and thus significantly 
> grow its current user base.
>
> I'm sorry to repeat myself once again on this forum, but it's 
> obvious to me that D's strongest feature at the moment is that 
> it has the best syntax on the market.

I personally will not go that far. Syntax is more about 
preference. Rust looks dog ugly to me and yet some people find it 
beautiful.

Personally i find Swift / Kotlin a nicer looking syntax then D.

> Reference types, strings, maps, slices, arrays, UFCS, etc, 
> everything is made so that the most obvious and readable code 
> will work both safely and efficiently.
>
> There is absolutely zero syntactic noise, the code is crystal 
> clear.
>
> So instead of losing many potential users by focusing on a 
> niche market (unhappy C++ programmers), D should focus on its 
> major strengths, which already now make it stand high above its 
> competition.

Agrees with that. The problem with a language trying to scope 
away a specific group of developers, from a existing ecosystem is 
that your fighting the entire ecosystem, not just the language. 
That is a mistake that many new languages make.

Why switch over from C++ to D?

Language => Sure.
Tooling => No.
Libraries => No.
Editors => No.
...

That has been the dilemma that not only D has faced. Until you 
get critical mass where people start writing a massive amount of 
your ecosystem, its hard to get people to switch over.

> For instance, all these programmer-friendly features make D 
> even more convenient for scripting than scripting languages 
> themselves.

True but the same can be said about Go. And Go is even more 
friendly and has the ecosystem now. You want to write something 
more exotic. There is big change that somebody wrote a 
module/package in Go. That is not going on with D. Sure, you can 
take a existing c library and transform it into D but it still 
takes work and is not always 100% idiomatic D.

That is the main difference between D and lets say Kotlin. Kotlin 
build on top of Java and you can native imports all the 
libraries. There is less effort involved.

Maybe this was mentioned before but a lot of programmers prefer 
to lazy program. They want to write there code, move forward with 
there project and not spend time on trying to get "things" to 
import/convert/work. D has more people who have no issue doing 
things the "hard" way. I applaud that resolve, i really do. But 
at the same time its a barrier, a attitude that makes it hard to 
accept those lazy people like me :)

> IMHO, trying to compete directly with C++, C# and Java, with 
> the current state of the language and of its ecosystem, is 
> simply choosing the hardest path to success...

See above. Some people prefer the hard way. The masochists 
*haha*. I know the angle where your coming from Ecstatic but its 
hard to convince people. Especially when there is a manpower 
shortage.

Frankly, i think the best way to go about moving D to popularity, 
is simply money. More fully time programmers but that requires 
money.

I do not understand why D does not have a BountySource account ( 
salt.bountysource.com ).

Look at nim ( $1,896 last month ) /crystal ( $2,345 this month ):

They publish there fund raising. They motivate people by pointing 
out the backers. Their income is a extra full time developer ( 
who wants to work for cheap :) ). The whole D foundation is nice 
and well but to me it feels like cloak and daggers. It something 
hiding in the background, something obscure. Maybe i am not 
expressing myself good again but D its fund raising seems to be 
largely corporate focused but they seem to lose a big market 
potential. Corporate funding is harder to get then a lot of small 
donations.

Its just my two cents but if D wants to grow, it needs full time 
developers. Not just volunteer work. People who can do the grunt 
work that volunteers do not want to do ( because its just not 
sexy ).