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

[Chris]

On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 09:42:01 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
[...]

> Yes - the tolerance for experimentation is an important 
> question.
>  In firms where there isn't much of a tolerance for 
> experimenting and for some of those experiments to fail then 
> it's probably not the right environment to use D.  But I think 
> the more interesting places to work are quite different.

That's all good and well and I sincerely congratulate you on your 
success. But what I see is the following divide: those who say 
that D works for their business usually use it for very specific 
purposes with a custom made ecosystem they've built up over the 
years (as I did too) maybe bound to a particular version of dmd 
or D1, and it's often for in-house purposes, e.g. analyzing the 
stock market or optimizing internet ads or machine learning. D is 
of course a good tool for that kinda stuff (as is Lisp or Scala). 
But once you have to step out of your biotope things get hairy. 
Once customers depend on your software directly (as in: 
installing it directly on a machine, interfacing with it via plug 
ins or accessing an API on your web server), you're out in the 
wild with D as far as tooling and stability (breaking changes) 
are concerned. In other words, D is good for fenced off software 
that is built for very specific purposes. When it comes to 
"general purpose", however, it's a different story all together. 
This is what I'm trying to convey.

D was a personal success for you, good, but I'm sure in a few 
years people will tell similar stories about Crystal, Nim and 
whatnot. When you started using D it had the edge over other 
languages in some respects, but other languages have caught up 
and offer ease of use on top of that. This is what doesn't 
register with the D community. Some users live happily in their 
respective self-made D biotopes, while others want more, a 
broader focus (and they mean well as they want D to be suceessful 
in the world not just in niches). These are the two factions, and 
it's the biotope faction that dominates the Foundation and the 
forum, indeed the "biotopeism" in the community is so far 
advanced that people have stared to fork D, the ultimate stage of 
"Ok, I'll do my own thing.", which is of course only a logical 
consequence of the insular mentality that permeates D culture. 
You encourage people to do it themselves, they will finally fork.

As there is no way the two factions can communicate with each 
other, there is only one logical consequence. The faction with 
the broader focus (like myself) wanders off and what remains are 
the die hard users who are happy in their biotope, so D will 
remain a niche language and, of course, there's the danger that 
some people will break off, fork D and add to the general chaos 
(and you may read questions like this on Stackoverflow: "Which D 
should I use? There are N implementations. Dragon, Volt, BetterD, 
CleanD, SaneD...").