Interesting Observation from JAXLondon

[Joakim]

On Sunday, 21 October 2018 at 01:12:44 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
(Abscissa) wrote:
> On 10/12/18 4:05 AM, Vijay Nayar wrote:
>> But the D community has also been very receptive of changes to 
>> the language
>> 
>
> The community is. I don't feel like it's been true of the 
> leadership for some years now (and I don't mean just W&A.)
>
>> One thing that does concern me, is the avenues in which people 
>> can discover D.  For me personally, after a particularly nasty 
>> C++ project, I just googled for "alternatives to C++" and 
>> that's how I found D back in 2009 or so.  But the same search 
>> today turns up nothing about D.  I'm not sure sure how people 
>> are supposed to find D.
>
> This is a VERY important thing, and it's true for many of us 
> (myself included). This why it was a HUGE mistake when the 
> community decided it should become taboo to promote D as a 
> redesigned C++. That was ALWAYS D's core strength, we all know 
> it, that's why many (if not most) of us are here, and hell, 
> that's literally what D was *intentionally designed* to be.
>
> But then political correctness came and threw that angle out 
> the window, in favor of this awkward "fast code fast" nonsense, 
> and we've been fighting the uphill "I don't understand the 
> point of D" image battle ever since.

Simple, C++ is increasingly seen as irrelevant by those choosing 
a new language, so D's real competition is now Go, Rust, Swift, 
Nim, Zig, etc. These are people who want to write "fast code 
fast," well except for Rust users, who value ownership more.

Also, D can pitch itself to Java/C# users who need more 
performance with that softer pitch, because many of them have 
been burned by C++ and would recoil if you made the explicit C++ 
comparison. It is well-known that Rust and Go are attracting 
users from the Java and scripting communities, D needs to attract 
them too, as the Tilix dev noted to me last year:

"[M]y background is in Java. I found it quite interesting at 
DConf when I asked how many people came from a non C/C++ 
background that only one other fellow raised his hand...

I tend to get more annoyed about the negativity in the forums 
with regards to GC. I do feel that sometimes people get so 
wrapped up in what D needs for it to be a perfect systems 
language (i.e. no GC, memory safety, etc.), it gets overlooked 
that it is a very good language for building native applications 
as it is now. While D is often compared to Rust, in some ways the 
comparison to Go is more interesting to me. Both are GC-based 
languages and both started as systems languages, however Go 
pivoted and doubled down on the GC and has seen success. One of 
the Red Hat products I support, OpenShift, leverages Kubernetes 
(a Google project) for container orchestration and it’s written 
in Go.

I think D as a language is far superior to Go, and I wish we 
would toot our horn a little more in this regard instead of the 
constant negative discussion around systems programming."
https://dlang.org/blog/2017/08/11/on-tilix-and-d-an-interview-with-gerald-nunn/