D beyond the specs

[bachmeier]

On Friday, 16 March 2018 at 16:18:55 UTC, jmh530 wrote:

> We use qwerty because that's what the first commercially 
> successful typewriter used. When computers came about, they 
> needed to get people to transition over. Keeping qwerty was the 
> optimal decision because of marginal costs and marginal 
> benefits, not just random decisions.
>
> Its creator didn't choose it randomly. He put the keys that 
> were most common where it was easiest to get at them, but it 
> jammed if people were typing too quickly so he made you type 
> the most common letters with your left hand instead of right.
>
> Some people bring up the Dvorak keyboard, but the evidence that 
> it was better was scant and the marginal benefit of switching 
> was too small to justify the cost.

The point is that there is no "fundamental" reason someone using 
a computer uses a qwerty keyboard. If you are to ask "what makes 
the qwerty keyboard the best choice for someone using a 
computer?" you are not going to have any luck finding the answer 
(or worse, you will find an answer after sufficient data mining). 
Similarly for programming language usage. There may have been 
perfectly good reasons for the early adopters of D, but it's not 
going to help to look for features of the D language that fit 
certain cultures better. It may be as simple as someone getting 
introduced to the D language because of a typo in a Google search.