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

[Chris]

On Wednesday, 28 November 2018 at 20:09:20 UTC, welkam wrote:
> On Tuesday, 27 November 2018 at 08:52:07 UTC, Chris wrote:
>>

>
> Lets say A, B and C needs to be done but core team can only 
> work on one thing. If they work on A people complain that B and 
> C is not worked on. If they worked on B people complain that A 
> and C is not worked on and if they worked on C people would 
> complain that A and B is not being worked on.
>
> In principle D could be best language for many things and 
> people want their use case to be prioritized. But D doesnt have 
> enough resources to work on all of that. Hack we dont have 
> people working on std.io library, some std libraries are 
> sub-par. If you write your project from scratch and it doesn't 
> depend on external libraries then D is awesome but for 
> everything else its just meh.
>
> And about tools. These kinds of captain obvious advises are not 
> welcomed. First they imply astronomical incompetence of 
> everyone who works on D and second they just waste time. If you 
> asked on forum if better tooling was useful for language growth 
> you will get almost everyone agreeing. Its not that they just 
> agree with words but they agree with actions
> https://dlang.org/blog/2018/07/13/funding-code-d/
>
> From my personal experience tooling is noticeably better than 
> last time I tired D.

My suggestion is one year of rehab and detox for D (open a DTox 
fork if you like):

- feature freeze
- fix old bugs
- do a general clean up
- develop sound and stable tooling
- improve integration with existing technologies (Java / GraalVM 
/ Android / iOS)
- release a stable version of D with LTS - i.e. establish a long 
term contract between users and creators.

The fist three bullet points above are normal in software 
development. And the rest is common sense.

Unfortunately, D is all about features and "showing C++" and 
whatnot. It sometimes seems to me like the boys want to play, 
whatever strikes their fancy at a given moment.


>
> So you havent worked on boring stuff after 8h of potential 
> boring stuff. Thats what I tried to convey.

Cos it wasn't worth it.

>
>> but then
>>
>> 1) I had to spend time fixing my own code due to dmd updates
>
> From what I can tell DMD improved on this. I use to hear about 
> new updates breaking peoples code and now most of what I hear 
> is that updates used to break code in the past. My guess unit 
> tests improved this and they came mostly because compiler was 
> converted to D.

The problem is that you never know when it will hit you (again) 
as long as the core devs and community are trigger happy when it 
comes to new features. Your code must go to make room for feature 
X.


>
> Like Ubuntu, red hat and suse? Red hat annual revenue is $2.9 
> billion. That with a B. Now I cant find it but I remember 
> reading that pacman was maintained by single person and some 
> people were angry that for long time pacman didnt check 
> download validity or something. If my examples were not what 
> you thought than stop being vague and be more concrete.

Linux: ArchLinux, Manjaro. Especially Manjaro started as a one 
man project.

SoX: to this day used in audio software all over the world, by 
professionals.

Especially in the audio world there are many successful projects 
/ libs.

> P.s. we might be the only one left talking in this thread. We 
> could talk about hentai and no one would be wiser :D

We've been found out!