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

[Radu]

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?

Meeting your popularity expectations, yes, I would say it has 
failed.

But, I would say this is also a great thing, being popular is not 
necessary a good thing all the time.
I'm amazed by how much a group of passionate people with little 
corporate support can achieve, you have to check the PRs on 
Github and the lively discussions on this forum.

I would be more worried if Dlang would lose its contributors 
critical mass. I have witnessed during the years some talented 
people leaving the community, mostly due to friction with how 
things were run or communicated. Recently there is a breath of 
fresh air, as vision and attitude toward setting goals and 
clearly communicating them to the community coming from Andrei 
and Walter. The result, some old dissharted contributors have 
re-joined and started to do Great&Right Work™.

There are also pretty encouraging signals from the students 
joining the D GSoC program. We should capture their interest, and 
keep some of the talented ones as contributors.

What matters in the end is that Dlang stays true to its core 
principles, native system programing with pragmatic productivity, 
and keeps improving quality across the board.

People, including myself, are using Dlang for interesting work, 
so for a group of us this is not a silly language experiment. It 
brings home the bacon, so to speak.
Maybe we are not very vocal as other communities are but D runs a 
bunch of systems, commercial or not, already.