D beyond the specs

[Chris]

On Saturday, 17 March 2018 at 20:02:01 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:

>
> And yet in Paris lives a man, presumably a French citizen, who 
> was working on a cryptocurrency scaling startup last dconf and 
> that ended up being part of the path towards launching Bitcoin 
> Cash.  So some French citizens don't seem to mind taking risks 
> or trying new things, and if there is a dampening of 
> entrepreneurial spirits it might be the government and culture.
>  That's just one example, but the outliers can often tell you 
> more than those in the centre of the distribution.

Yes, the government and beaurocrats in the administration etc. 
more often than not dampen the entrepreneurial spirit in Europe. 
Then again, people prefer security over freedom, because it 
involves risk, this attitude in turn feeds the "riskophobic" 
nanny state which in turn feeds  people's risk-aversion (hen or 
egg?) and so on till the whole thing collapses or people get sick 
and tired of it.

> Things change slowly in the beginning.  Top management aren't 
> the ones to start doing something creative unless they are a 
> highly unusual kind of firm.  It's people who can decide or who 
> don't need to ask anyone's permission that are the early 
> adopters.

A common conversation when the top management is "confronted" 
with a new idea:

Manager: "Has anyone ever done that before?"
Foot soldier: "Err, no. It's a new idea."
Manager: "Then we won't do it either!"

> Anyway I asked Walter about why so many Germans in the D 
> community.  No final answer.  It's interesting that Walter is 
> of German descent.  A controversial topic, but in my experience 
> what you are from shapes who you are, how you think and what 
> you value.

> And receptivity to a particular way of doing things isn't 
> uniform across the world.

I agree. That's why I started this thread. I already suspected 
that Walter had German anscestors, but didn't dare to ask (you 
know how things are these days ;) And maybe herein lies part of 
the answer. Maybe that's why D is a mixture of pragmatism 
(Anglo-Saxon) and (sometimes obsessive) attention to detail 
(German). And maybe this tension between pragmatism and 
perfectionism attracts more and more programmers as it not only 
reflects the problems they encounter in their daily work, but 
opens up a whole new field of possibilities / opportunities both 
in terms of language development and problem solving.

Other things that have been said so far are very interesting, 
i.e. the recent developments that leave languages like D some 
space to breathe. I've noticed that it is increasingly harder for 
big corporations to force their technologies (i.e. languages) on 
programmers, for various reasons, one of which is the certainly 
the fact that many programmers and coders have become wary and / 
or tired of language hypes - and the bitter experience that you 
always end up in a cul-de-sac at whose end sits a stubborn 
committee that develops a given language along ideological lines 
and not according to what people need.