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

[Joakim]

On Friday, 23 November 2018 at 19:51:23 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> On Friday, 23 November 2018 at 10:25:57 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 21 November 2018 at 14:38:07 UTC, Chris wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, 21 November 2018 at 13:26:34 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>>
>> [...]
>> Why hasn't ruby/rails, Rust, or Nim gotten backing from big 
>> players yet? Most things don't get backing from big players, 
>> especially initially. What you hope is to create a superior 
>> tool that helps small companies grow into the big players 
>> someday.
>> [...]
>
> They have, unless you aren't paying attention to the news it 
> seems.
>
> Sun invested into JRuby and Netbeans support, while they 
> dropped support for
> Netbeans, under Oracle's stewardship, they kept investing into 
> JRuby. In fact JRuby is what drives most of the Graal 
> optimizations regarding compilation of dynamic languages and 
> was the genesis of Project Panama, JNI's replacement project.
>
> Besides being sponsored by Mozilla, Rust is now used in Visual 
> Studio Code, IoT Core native layer and an internal distributed 
> service by Microsoft. There are also ongoing projects from 
> Oracle and Dropbox.
>
> Khronos is working together with Mozilla on a multi-platform 3D 
> API framework, which is built with Rust.
>
> Four game studios, namely Ready at Dawn, Chucklefish, SEED and 
> Embark(former DICE/EA devs) have announced that they are 
> building their future tooling and engine improvement with Rust.
>
> Rust was given the spotlight alongside C and C++ at Chrome 
> Developers Summit 2018 regarding the languages currently mature 
> for WebAssembly development.
>
> GNOME is adopting Rust and collaborating with Mozilla to 
> improve the overall development experience when dealing with 
> the gobject OOP model.
>
> Nim just got some support from Status, one of the companies 
> behind Ethereum, but I guess it isn't a major player.
>
> So there is some support going on from them.
>
> --
> Paulo

I was aware of most of those efforts, but I wouldn't call any of 
them big players like Chris wanted, nor those Microsoft efforts 
as much of a "backing." We all pay attention when giant 
corporations really back an OSS language, such as Apple has done 
with Swift, because that means we get a lot of free dev tools to 
play with, ;) and these languages don't have it.

Anyway, my intention was not to put those languages down, only to 
point out that even fairly successful or known languages like 
these never got a big player really backing them. As I've pointed 
out with my Linus quotes before about how Linux was built, I 
think it's much better for OSS tech to have many small or medium 
backers putting it to many different kinds of uses rather than 
one or two big backers who tend to use it in a certain way, as 
Linus says that tends to make the tech less specialized and more 
likely to survive over the long haul:

https://yarchive.net/comp/evolution.html