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

[Julian]

On Saturday, 13 April 2019 at 08:43:06 UTC, silentwatcher wrote:
> you are wright, that happened to me too, only earlier.
> and now that you read that thread, it becomes hurtingly
> apparent, that the management and the compiler guru have no
> idea, or just don't care, on how to respond to people with
> valid objections.

Faced with non-response, you've decided that you're actually
experiencing a very specific response, which is also emotionally
convenient for you. This should be a red flag.

You are not in the middle of a direct conversation with 
"management
and compiler guru", nor have you pulled them onto their front
doorstep to face you and the angry mob at your back. Rather, 
you're
in a situation more like a noisy cafeteria in which you are
spreading rumors or are disparaging someone just loudly enough 
that
he can hear you from his other table.

In this cafeteria-like situation, the stock dialogue that should
come to mind is, not "cat got your tongue? You were talking so
happily before, but now you have nothing to say, huh?!" but rather
"I don't need to dignify that with a response." or "You can tell
you're over the target when you start to get flak."

People just don't care that much about rumors that are so off-base
nobody would believe them anyway. If someone's loudly insinuating
that you'd once cheated your brother in a business deal, and you
have no brothers, you may as well take anyone's concerns about 
this
insinuation when they come to you personally about them. They'll
feel silly for having even paid attention to the loud guy.

> maybe some of the disciples will come to the rescue and tell a
> story on how great everything is in there niche or with there
> hobby.

Have you ever asked yourself, "hmm, I wonder if there's a huge
number of people around here that are vegans, or if that's pretty
niche." ? Maybe you could wonder it now, to follow along. This
question is trivially answered: just go out to get food.

If you're in India, half of the hotel menu will be vegan dishes.
Every single restaurant you go to will have a good variety of 
vegan
options. Not "you can blow the cheese off the salad if you want,
weirdo" kinda options, but five different mushroom burgers, etc.
Fancy stuff.

If you're in Texas, the norm is closer to "you can blow the cheese
off the salad if you want, weirdo."

So here you are, looking at a blatant scarcity of GUI builders or
mobile development options, and you're exclaiming: where are all
the vegan options?!  Isn't like 70% of the Texas vegans?! Do you
all stay home to eat??  What's *wrong* with these stupid
restaurants that are all ignoring what must be a *huge* vegan
demand!

An actually productive thing to do would be to add "desktop GUI
development" and "mobile development" to a long chart of tiny 
niches
that programming languages can be variously useful for, and you 
can
give D a 1..10 score, with justifications. A score 11 language
would have an AI chatbot that hooks your entire desktop GUI up to
your application for you based on conversations with the AI about
it. A score 10 language might just have an extremely good GUI
builder that doesn't limit you or add extra overhead to the
resulting GUI. A score 4 language might have Gtk and Qt bindings
that you can use if you have independently good knowledge of Gtk 
or
Qt, but you'll have to work a bit.

The score's just a hint. The negative and positive justifications
are the real value of a chart like this. Someone wanting to add a
GUI to their D application might look at the chart and say, eh, I
guess I'll serve a local webpage with vibe. Someone wanting to
round out D's usefulness as a language might look at the chart, 
see
that "server-side scripting" is a niche impaired by std.regex's
performance, and add a GSoC task about that. Someone want to argue
that D's stagnated and isn't getting more useful as a language can
refer to versions of this chart over time.