Feedback on Átila's Vision for D

[Chris]

On Friday, 18 October 2019 at 13:54:19 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:

>
> How does any programming language scale? It doesn't, it's just 
> a programming language.
>
> If we take scale to mean able to be as easily used by 200 
> programmers on a 10,000,000 line codebase as as 1 programmer on 
> a 100 line codebase, then generally no-one has any idea, and 
> certainly no data. For any language. The whole scaling argument 
> regarding codebases is usually vacuous philosophising. Most 
> teams use a programming language and then find out how to use 
> it for big codebases as for little ones when their little 
> codebase becomes a big one. cf. FORTRAN, Fortran, C++, COBOL, 
> Go, Rust, Lisp, SML, etc.

"scales" as in consistency (including backward compatibility), 
tooling and libraries. As Guillaume said, Java scales very well, 
and I think it's because it scores high at the aforementioned 
features. Simplicity (or rigidity) is certainly part of it (cf. 
Scala - I've heard it's easy to make your code incompatible due 
to "too much freedom", or Scheme). Maybe Java (and to a lesser 
degree Kotlin) dictates a certain style, but it also gives you a 
sense of direction and you know you're "doing the right thing". 
This enhances productivity. It's solid and reliable. That's why 
many people switched from C++ to Java. D could have been a native 
alternative to both C++ and Java and I think it was heading into 
that direction, but then it kinda digressed...and now nobody can 
actually say where D's place is.