How programmers transition between languages

Russel Winder russel at winder.org.uk
Sun Jan 28 16:25:40 UTC 2018


On Sun, 2018-01-28 at 15:36 +0000, bachmeier via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 
[…]
> I'd say Julia is getting a lot more attention than Rust or Go for 
> those users. And rightfully so.

I am still not sure Julia is getting traction outside a few
communities. Python still seems to be the language of choice in data
analysis visualisation.

> > I wonder if we do need to pay more attention to attracting new 
> > users just to get people talking about it.
> 
> I'm not sure why those users would be interested in D at the 
> moment. D presents itself as a C++ replacement, discussions are 
> all about low-level stuff, garbage collection, and efficiency, 
> and new users are told to use Dub and learn about Git submodules. 
> That's not ever going to appeal to the R and Matlab crowd. I have 
> gotten others to start using D, and it was quite easy. Just make 
> an R package containing D code, they install it, and then they 
> call D functions from R. Few in this community understand that 
> style of programming though.

Dub looked like it was going to be good, but somehow development
stopped and it fails to deliver compared to Cargo.  Although Cargo is
language specific, and thus inferior to SCons, Meson, CMake, etc., it
works very well indeed for building and installing Rust codes. The Go
system works well in the context of a workspace structured system.

Compared to the Rust and Go community, D is lacking a package system
and build system that really works. Also, a JetBrains IDE for D is
absent – though Samael and Francis are trying very hard to improve
this. The problem is though that JetBrains are unlikely to pick up the
plugin and make it official in the way that they did Rust and Go.
Perhaps the Clojure plugin model as per Cursive might be in order, i.e.
people pay an annual subscription for it within the free to use
IntelliJ IDEA. 

-- 
Russel.
===========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk
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