Go 1.9

[Ecstatic Coder via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 10:17:16 UTC, Wulfklaue wrote:
> 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 ).

I agree with all that you said.

Just about Go, I must say that language is a bit rude, and 
actually less convenient and versatile than D.

Many convenient features are missing (true reference classes, 
member function polymorphism, generics, etc).

IMHO, Go is lagging somewhere between C and D.

Kotlin is a better contender, especially with is LLVM 
implementation.

And with its current ecosystem, I'm sorry to say that indeed 
Kotlin native is becoming de factor the best alternative to D.