It is the year 2020: why should I use / learn D?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 10:29:56PM +0000, Stanislav Blinov via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, 15 November 2018 at 19:54:06 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 11:17:43AM -0800, Ali Çehreli via Digitalmars-d
> > wrote:
> 
> > > "We don't want C++ become like COBOL." My answer is, C++ is
> > > heading exactly the same place not through natural death but
> > > through those improvements.
> > [...]
> > 
> > And that's the problem with C++: because of the insistence on
> > backward compatibility, the only way forward is to engineer
> > extremely delicate and elaborate solutions to work around
> > fundamental language design flaws...
> 
> Funny you should say that, as that same problem already holds D back
> quite a lot. The Argument No.1 against pretty much any change in
> recent years is "it will break too much code".

Yes, this obsession with not breaking existing code is a thorn in D's
side.  D is not quite at the point of C++, where *nothing* legacy can
change (like getting rid of that evil preprocessor); we still have a
process for deprecating old stuff.  A slow process, perhaps slower than
many would like, but it has been happening over the years, and has
cleaned up some of the uglier parts of the language / standard library.

Still, it's sad to see that bad decisions like autodecoding probably
won't ever be fixed, because it "breaks too much code".


> > Writing C++ code therefore becomes an exercise in navigating the
> > obstacle course of an overly-complex and fragile language...
> 
> Same will happen to D. Or rather, it already has.

I won't pretend D doesn't have its dark corners... but as of right now,
it's still orders of magnitude better than C++.  It lets me express
complex computations with a minimum of fuss and red tape, and I can get
a lot done in a short time far better than in C/C++/Java.  Especially
Java. :-P  So far, at least, I haven't found another language that
doesn't get in my way the same way D does.  D is far from perfect, but I
haven't seen a better alternative yet.


T

-- 
If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time. -- G. K. Chesterton