How programmers transition between languages

aberba karabutaworld at gmail.com
Tue Jan 30 09:20:37 UTC 2018


On Sunday, 28 January 2018 at 18:54:34 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> On Sunday, 28 January 2018 at 13:50:03 UTC, Michael wrote:
>> I do worry that, having been using D for about 3 1/2 years 
>> now, that the perceptions of D outside of this community don't 
>> seem to be changing much. It does seem to make a huge 
>> difference to have a big company behind a language, purely for 
>> the "free advertisement". Most people at my university, 
>> outside of the computer science department, that are using 
>> languages like Python and R and MATLAB the most, are very 
>> aware of Rust and Go, but not D. I wonder if we do need to pay 
>> more attention to attracting new users just to get people 
>> talking about it.
>
> That's what you would expect, because D is a very ambitious 
> language, which means its natural user base is much more spread 
> out and less highly concentrated.  And beyond that, most code 
> is enterprise code that's closed source, and whilst the web 
> guys talk a lot and influence the culture, enterprise guys talk 
> much less and just do their thing quietly.  Even in our world, 
> how often do you see the people using D get involved in forum 
> discussions?  Sociomantic, Weka, Ebay, and so on.  (Or 
> Microsoft - did you know that D was used in their COM team?  
> They didn't exactly send out a press release...)  A little bit, 
> but only a little in relation to their use of the language.  If 
> you're trying to accomplish something in a representative 
> enterprise context with lean resources, you don't have much 
> time to talk about what you are doing.
That's one big potential mistake. Enterprises care about making 
money with whatever will help them do that (impress investors). 
Its developers who care about languages that help them write code 
that suites their requirements. The focus should be on developers 
not companies. People using D cannot be represented by Microsoft, 
  Sociomantic,  Weka,  etc. employees. Its of no use chasing after 
companies... make it useful and everyone else will come.


>
> If you want to draw people to the language (and, honestly, I 
> wonder why it matters so much to many here
Its a simple math well understood since long ago.  The larger the 
army/workforce the better. Things get done. Walter always say 
here "Its left with someone to do the work". There other stuff he 
doesn't address including those outside language internals.

>- it's clearly
> taking hold, has momentum and will continue to grow for 
> decades; an acorn will become an oak tree, and fretting about 
> how much it's grown in the past year might be missing the 
> point, so long as it's healthy enough), why not just focus on 
> both improving the language itself (pull requests, 
> documentation)
Someone needs to do that and we're short of people willing,  have 
the time and able to do that.

Either someone is paid to care enough to do that (Like Google do 
with Go, Oracle with Java,  Jetbrains with Kotlin,  etc.) OR grow 
a community/workforce to collectively make that happen.

> and on accomplishing something useful and worth doing with it?
There's also a possibility the acorn will loose interest and 
momentum and... die. Your opinion on what is worth doing is based 
on your domain or interest.

>
> Of course there are the usual trolls who don't seem to write 
> much D, but seem to be drawn like vampires to the energy of 
> those who do.  Sad.

Someone who doesn't write D or have no stake in it's well-being 
will not waste a second in this forum.

> don't seem
You don't know for sure. Remember we don't all use D the same way.

>
>
>
>
> On Sunday, 28 January 2018 at 17:23:12 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> This has been mentioned multiple times, D really needs some 
>> kind of killer application.
>
> Why?
>
> It's a generalist language for getting stuff done in an age 
> where people have succumbed so much to Stockholm Syndrome that 
> they think it's a positive thing in a language that you can 
> only use it to do something special.  Yet trends in performance 
> and performance demands point to the rising importance of 
> efficiency (and I suspect there will be a return to the 
> recognition of the importance of being a generalist - in 
> programming, as in other fields).  There was a tweet by the 
> author of Musl libc observing that software today runs slower 
> than software twenty years ago, and linking the bloat to the 
> insane pressure to maximise CPU performance over all else.  The 
> era of that kind of ruthless optimization is over because it's 
> not the only thing that matters, and we start to see the price 
> of it.  And generalism - in a dynamic business environment, 
> there's considerable value to have capabilities that aren't 
> adapted to particular narrow skills when what you need is 
> always changing and may be unknown even to you.
>
> My generation was privileged because very quickly if you wanted 
> to get anything interesting done you had to learn assembly 
> language (maybe write your own assembler or disassembler), had 
> to learn a bit about hardware, and could never pretend the CPU 
> was this perfect platonic abstraction.  And for a while that 
> changed, but I think the past is returning again, as it often 
> does.
>
> So I see a value in hiring hacker / generalist types who can 
> figure things out.  For example:
>
> https://hackaday.com/2017/01/26/a-personal-fight-against-the-modern-laptop/
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzmm87oVQ6c
>
> Back in 2007, most finance types would have said how completely 
> impracticable and unreasonable.  But I say, with GK Chesterton, 
> that "all progress depends on the unreasonable man".  And 
> someone like that doesn't succumb to helplessness once they are 
> outside of their shiny IDE, knows that in the end everything is 
> just code, and you can change it if you want to, and there is 
> strategic value from building organisational capabilities from 
> hiring such people.  Usually I'm a couple of years ahead, and I 
> think others will follow.  If you hold a contrarian point of 
> view, you know you're right when surprises start coming in your 
> direction, and people still can't see it.  And I think that's 
> been the case since 2014.
>
> Anyway - so D is a general purpose language, and I think we are 
> likely seeing a nascent return in recognizing the value of 
> generalist tools and people.
>
>> On my line of work having Go on the skills list is slowly 
>> becoming a requirement, due to Docker and Kubernetes adoption 
>> on cloud infrastructures.
>
> That's great.  Walter says that good code should look good on 
> the page, and Go code looks nice enough.  It's got nice network 
> and infra libraries, as you say.  But why would the adoption of 
> Go be bad for D?  I think it's great for D because after a 
> period of stagnation it gets people open to newer languages, 
> and on the other hand the gap between the spirit of Go and D 
> isn't that far (GC, clean code, native target) even if they 
> don't have generics.
>  It's a big world - both D and Go can succeed, and the success 
> of one isn't bought at the cost of the other.
>
>> Just wondering if mir or easier GPGPU programming could be 
>> that killer application.
>
> We sponsor mir algorithm (some of the routines within were 
> developed for us, and we were happy to open source them), and 
> we are rewriting our core analytics - used across the firm in a 
> $4.1bn hedge fund in D from C++ before that.  What alternative 
> really exists for what we are doing there?  And C++ vs D, it's 
> not even a fair fight if you care about productivity, 
> plasticity of the code, and generating wrappers for other 
> languages that you can still understand whilst maintaining 
> decent performance.  At the same time, we're not a D shop - a 
> diversity of languages is not a bad thing, provided you have 
> some way for them to work together.  Code reuse is very 
> difficult, but the UNIX way does work.  On the other hand, if 
> you want to connect components, how are you to do that?  Well, 
> D is pretty nice for writing DSLs that can connect to code 
> written in other languages, and where expressions can be 
> evaluated from other languages.
>
> A specialist language adapted to a particular domain or set of 
> domains - yes, that benefits from a killer app.  But for a 
> generalist language that's useful for getting stuff done - why 
> would there be a single killer app?  That doesn't make sense to 
> me.  There should be multiple successes across different 
> domains, and that's what we are beginning to see.  Just bear in 
> mind that the web and tech guys talk a lot, but most 
> programmers don't work in those industries.  It would be a 
> mistake to conflate salience with economic importance, I think.
>
>
> Laeeth.




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