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

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Friday, 16 November 2018 at 03:50:55 UTC, Aurélien Plazzotta 
wrote:
> On Friday, 16 November 2018 at 02:02:26 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>>
>> Talking about D3 has sorta become taboo around here, for 
>> understandable reasons -- splitting the community now might 
>> very well be the death of D after that Tango vs. Phobos fiasco.
>>  Python survived such a transition, and Perl too AIUI.  But D 
>> currently does not have nearly the size of Python or Perl to 
>> be able to bear the brunt of such a drastic change.
>>
>> Nevertheless I can't help wondering if it would be beneficial 
>> to one day sit down and sketch out D3, even if we never 
>> actually implement it. It may give us some insights on the 
>> language design we should strive to reach, based on the 
>> experience we have accumulated thus far. Autodecoding, even 
>> though it's a commonly mentioned example, actually is only a 
>> minor point as far as language design is concerned.  More 
>> fundamental issues could be how to address the can of worms 
>> that 'shared' has become, for example, or what the type system 
>> might look like if we were to shed the vestiges of C integer 
>> promotion rules.
>>
>>
>> T
>
> I can't help but think D3 is the one true way to go to become 
> significantly adopted by more companies.

Maybe it would be a good thing, but I think it's maturity of 
compilers, ecosystem and tooling that's the biggest obstacle for 
adoption - and perceptions are lagging and where we are today is 
a consequence of decisions taken some time back.  Start to 
improve things and it's a while before you see results and longer 
again before people notice.

> Maybe ten companies are using D for minor projects, it doesn't 
> justify to stall or slow down the whole language specs.

Come on - there are quite significant entire companies where D is 
critical and others where it is used for important projects.

Starting again from scratch may or may not be a good idea, but it 
won't exactly help with maturity or for many adoption.  "I think 
I will wait till D3 is ready".

I don't know but any fixing of past mistakes seems to me a much 
smaller change than D1 to D2 and so I don't know if it is the 
ideal framing.  It's more like D 2.1 although then the versioning 
of releases gets a bit confusing.


> The language is still in a phase where it can allow himself 
> breaking changes to significantly improve its performances or 
> reduce the frictions and asymetries.

Sure.


> However, I wouldn't gamble a penny on D3 for more practical 
> reasons.
> The creators and the main contributors of D are all C++ 
> full-time developers

?  I don't think so.  Walter is a full-time developer of the D 
language and he has just put a lot of work into moving both dmd 
and DMC from C++ to D.  Andrei quit Facebook to work full-time on 
the D Foundation.  Maybe they do some other consulting on the 
side.  If you were CEO of D and they worked for you, you would 
want them to do this because it's good for the language that they 
do.

Other contributors do all kinds of different things.  I work with 
a decent number of them and mostly they work on D projects 
full-time.

>  some of them even members of C++ commities.

Traitors!  We must hunt them down and expel them!  Seriously,how 
can this be a bad thing?  Some people are even members of 
non-native code communities also!  Why wouldn't we want to have 
the benefit of the idea interchange that results ?

> For example, Walter distribute and commercialize a C++ compiler
That's his old gig and he keeps something going I guess, but it 
doesn't look to me like he is putting much time into DMC.  When 
is the Cpp 2017 version coming out?  My guess is never.

  > And Andrei contribute to C++ meeting in order to
> identify and improve the weaknesses of C++...

And they often don't listen and mess it up when they do, just 
like with static if.  How is this a bad thing?  If C++ gets 
better,I really don't think it's bad for D.

> No offense, but I don't think anyone important here believe in 
> D becoming a industry-proof language in any timeline.

Each must think what they will and I never worried much myself 
about who is important but rather who is doing good and 
interesting work.  Of those people some seem to be doing 
remarkably well using D.  I guess they aren't themselves bothered 
whether you consider them important either!

  In my
> opinion and with due respect, I am convinced that D is more or 
> less processed like a research laboratory to test and implement 
> new features to then improve C++ specs and its standard 
> librairies.

Interesting opinion.  I personally disagree - seems clearly wrong 
to me and some here might say "if only!  Would that it were true!"

> D cannot grow and develop its own identity if the main focus is 
> C/C++ compatibility.

Do you really think that's the case that it's the main focus?

> Make no mistake, nobody will abandon his job in C++ among the D 
> community to persuade a employer to hire him for a D full-time 
> job

:)

There are no jobs in D :)

I'm pretty sure you are mistaken both on the supply and demand 
side.

And we are still hiring.

> I wish I haven't hurt anyone's feelings but D project lack a 
> bit of long-term vision.

I think right now the vision is clear enough as far as it needs 
to be articulated and the biggest constraint is that the D 
Foundation hasn't been in existence for long and it's quite a lot 
of work to create something from nothing and it takes time from 
beginning to start to see results though if one pays attention I 
don't think it's hard to see plenty of results already.

Everything is an S curve - very flat in the beginning.