D IDE

[User]

On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 19:31:58 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:

> Because they can't hold a candle to vim. As far as text editing 
> goes, there simply is no comparison.



All these arguments, especially the above, makes me sad.

May be this is the nature of open source that volunteers will 
work only on things that they like and may not always be aligned 
with all the users needs.

D was born almost two decades ago when IDEs and tools that make 
user experience smooth as defined by current standards didn't 
exist that freely. Major competition then was c++ and Java.

D was a breath of fresh air. It was as fast as c++ and as clean 
as Java. No wonder many people loved D.

Nowadays the programming language landscape is much different. 
With Go, Rust, etc the competition is not only catching up but 
even surpassing D in popularity. I wonder why. I sometimes feel D 
is still stuck in the previous era.

At least in my experience this smoothness factor has a heavy 
weight. I abandoned Java wonderful ecosystem for D's native and 
fast compilation and fast startup. I wrote D programs in 
notepad++ etc. I endured lack of so many wonderful features of a 
mature IDE like eclipse or netbeans.

Now after 20ish years still a mature and smooth ecosystem is no 
where in sight. D did find some success with expert programs,  
good for them, but I couldnt take it any more.

Funnily, I went back to Java. The improvements in java language, 
JVM and hardware in general lessened the pain of java very much. 
It was amazing how much easy and smooth experience matters to 
increase the productivity.

I still keep an eye on D, the ecosystem seems to be getting 
better although at glacial pace. Everytime I read a comment like 
above, this comes to my mind

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/supported_features.png