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

[bachmeier]

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:

> 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?

You have a very specific (and arbitrary) definition of failure. 
If the only reason to use a language is "popularity", presumably 
so you can financially benefit from it, then go with one of the 
small number of languages that are heavily used today. Language 
use has very little to do with the language itself. The biggest 
factor i determining language popularity today is language 
popularity five years ago. The cost to changing is too high and 
the benefits too small for companies to make a change.

D has succeeded in my opinion. It provides me with a language I 
can use to get things done. That's really all a language can do.

Are there areas that D is not the best choice? Of course. Folks 
complain "D doesn't work for my use case." Well C++ isn't a good 
choice for web development, Ruby isn't a good choice for high 
performance computing, Java isn't a good choice for embedded 
programming, and Javascript isn't a good choice for writing an 
operating system. That doesn't mean any of those languages has 
failed. There are plenty of cases where D is a good choice.