Has D failed? ( unpopular opinion but I think yes )

[Nierjerson]

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
> Sorry for that title, but this is something I have been 
> thinking about for a while...
>
> I honestly feel like D is a failure. I kinda just wanted to 
> vent about it and see what other people think.
>
> I have been using D since around 2012 or 2013, instantly fell 
> in love, use to post on the forms a lot under the name Tofu 
> Ninja. I was convinced D was the future but since then I have 
> become disheartened. The biggest thing that makes me feel like 
> this is that in the 7 years I have been using D I literally 
> have never met another programmer IRL who has even heard of it. 
> I put on my resume that I like D and every interview I get 
> asked about it, having to explain what D even is because they 
> have never heard of it. I have never seen a job posting listing 
> D. Never see any projects pop up on /r/programming using D. It 
> feels like to the rest of the programming universe, D doesn't 
> even exist. Sometimes I see threads on reddit like "what's your 
> favorite programming language" and I always look for D but 
> never find it.
>
> And honestly I don't think that is going to change. I feel like 
> D has failed.
>
> I duno... what do yall think? Is D going to somehow explode in 
> popularity in 5-10 years? Am I missing some part of the 
> picture? Or am I right and if so what can be done about it?

Yes D has failed if the goal is wide adoption. It will never gain 
wide recognition and use because the D community fails to realize 
that it's more than just the compiler and libraries.

What makes a compiler successful is not just the compiler itself 
but the easy to create real world business solutions by the mass 
of programmers in the world. Such people are not interested in 
wasting their time trying to get things to work, they want a 
product that will allow them to get as much work done in the 
shorted amount of time. D fails miserably at that in the real 
world.

D has no decent gui, gui designer, no decent audio library, no 
decent graphics library, no decent anything. The D community 
thinks that if it has a binding then it must be the same. 
Bindings are not solutions. One is just working in C, so what is 
the point of D then?

When you look at the most successful compilers you will see they 
have a huge amount of resources available that work without issue.

Essentially D costs too much and has too little in return. After 
all, you can pretty much do everything you want in C++ that you 
can do with D.

Imagine, hypothetically, if when C++ was invented it was actually 
the D language.

The sole reason that D has failed is the management of D has 
failed... and, of course, they will never accept that truth. They 
believe their methods are correct and working and the failure is 
not due to them. D is actually an old language and there are many 
new languages popping up like weeds... eventually D will not be 
so shiny and more and it will just become another weed. That is 
already happening actually.  As many languages modify their 
designs to include what was great about D, D becomes less 
attractive.

So, D started out with a bang but will finish as a whimper. It 
neglected so many important aspects of programming that it shot 
itself in the foot. Over time it won't be able to recover from 
this unless things seriously change about how it is managed. It 
is failed to reach escape velocity.

Most programmers don't give a shit about meta programming and all 
the cool shit D can do. So what is the point of them using it 
when most other things suck? All the effort that D wasted in 
library after library could have been focused on creating the 
things that users want/need but the libraries are now defunct and 
are bit rotting.

Eventually people will give up on maintaining D(in 10-20 years 
when new processors are out that require massive updating of D or 
a new OS comes about). D will die a slow and painful death. It 
didn't have to be that way but that is the outcome when you don't 
plan properly.  It has happened many times with many things... 
It's nature at work.

At most D could hope to do is get a large company with the 
resources to take it over like Microsoft... but they have no 
incentive to do that. Since D can integrate with C/C++ there is 
potential. But why would they do such a thing when they can just 
modify C++?

D has never been used for a major commercial app. It touts all 
it's uses, which is minuscule compared to the major players and 
most of these use cases are more it computing 
applications/utilities than anything major. I believe D is a 
failure for very complex real world apps. It just can't handle 
the load. A large business isn't going to waste it's time with 
something that has so many drawbacks and few benefits... it makes 
no sense to them to use D for anything serious. Even though D can 
be used to write specific code, since it does not perfectly 
integrate what is the point of just not writing it in the main 
language, even if it requires a little more work?

The only thing D has been really successful at is it's language 
design but that isn't enough to do much in this world.