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

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 12:34:12 UTC, Chris wrote:
> 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.

Yes well I don't claim to know about the demands of a business 
having lots of customers.  I would prefer to have as few 
customers as possible just due to temperament.

And it's about who your customers are, not just the number of 
them.

Weka.io have done well but they distribute binaries not source.

Like I say - I think most code is developed behind closed walls.  
And I would guess that it's a minority of commercial code that is 
distributed as source libraries.


> 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.

Of course and I hope those languages succeed. Zig too. It's a big 
world and there is room for plenty of emerging languages.  I 
don't think the success of one must come at the expense of others 
- I don't believe life is a zero-sum game as it's inherently 
generative.

> 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.

No I don't think so.  I think it was better for me and it still 
is.  That doesn't mean it's better for you because you are a 
different person doing different things.

If you come to dconf I will show you some of the things we are 
doing.  Or there's an event the day before that might be 
interesting.  Laeeth at kaleidic dot io


  > 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,

The Foundation is a new creature that doesn't do that much right 
now.  People talk of it like an empire!  Bearing in mind Ali 
wrote a book making it easy to learn D and he is helping the 
Foundations I hardly think one had grounds to say the Foundation 
is oriented towards narrow uses of D.

I sponsored the Autumn of Code and the projects selected weren't 
things that are the biggest priority for me personally, but they 
were good projects that would benefit D overall.  So I don't 
really recognise your assertion there either.

Maybe I will have another announcement ready by Dconf, but we 
shall see.

Importing C and later C++ headers - do you see that as a niche 
thing?  How about making it possible to write Excel add-ins and 
Jupyter kernels in D?  In my opinion you need to justify your 
assertion better.

  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.

Yes it's a bunch of opinionated individualists.  Plenty of people 
forked D already but I wouldn't say there's much information in 
that - rather I would be extremely puzzled if people weren't 
forking D.  Whether anything should come of it I don't know.


>
> 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...").

It's really strange to me.  You seem happier not using D and 
maybe it was the right decision for you given the business you 
are in.  But without skin in the game you have very strong 
opinions about the direction the language ecosystem should 
develop towards.

If you look at the companies using D, how would you describe the 
niche of D commercially?  I don't think it's possible to do so 
based on domain.  And note that certain others make the opposite 
complaint - that D doesn't have a niche and that people should 
decide what it should be.

I think that adoption is driven by the kinds of people that use D 
rather than the domain - it's a question of capabilities, culture 
and values.

Early adopters aren't like normal people.  D isn't ready for 
adoption by the masses yet, and that's entirely normal and just 
how the innovation cycle tends to unfold.