Nim programming language finally hit 1.0

[Ecstatic Coder]

On Sunday, 29 September 2019 at 01:29:59 UTC, Benjiro wrote:
> On Friday, 27 September 2019 at 15:11:26 UTC, GreatSam4sure 
> wrote:
>> The biggest problem to D adoption is this community IMHO. 
>> Almost everything here is negative. The community is 95% 
>> negative to the language. There are people here that never see 
>> anything good about D yet they are here. The community is 
>> damaging to D image.
>>
>> It is a community that is out to destroy the language. All the 
>> hope of me using D has been almost destroyed.
>
> As one of these negative people that from time to time reads up 
> on multiple languages forums.
>
> D was one of the first languages after moving away from Web 
> dev, that i liked from structure point. Even got the book from 
> Ali.
>
> But ... the more i worked with it, the more frustration, upon 
> frustration, upon ... kept creeping in with constant issues.
>
> * Not user friendly tooling ( somewhat improved, took only a 
> few years )
>
> * Compiler bugs. O those bugs ...
>
> * Upgrading the compiler resulting in packages ( like vibe.d 
> going broke )
>
> * Lacking IDE support ( somewhat improved on Visual Studio Code 
> )
>
> * Lacking in packages to easily get going.
>
> * Constant and frustrating changing direction. BetterC? First 
> get BetterD doing and when your a big boy, then do this.
>
> * The feeling off being looked down when suggestion that D is 
> not user friendly. Especially in the past you constantly got 
> this as a answer: "you have a issue, fix it yourself". Yes, 
> this was the constant answer from everybody.
>
> * The snarky and frankly poison comments from regular members. 
> Some of those now seem to have left but D really has some 
> members that got under anybody their skin for daring to mention 
> a issue.
>
> * Focus upon C++ crowd, when very few C++ developers have any 
> interest in D. Hell, if a C++ developer wants to switch, they 
> have better alternatives with bigger or better growing 
> communities.
>
> * A leadership that seems to be stuck in the 1990's mentality. 
> The world has moved on, people expect more these days, they 
> have choices most old timers did not have. So they are more 
> spoiled with those choices and are not going to put in the 
> time. But when you ignore those "spoiled" people, you never 
> build up a loyal base and you will never motivate them to help 
> out with code or money.
>
> You can not run anything worth while with D unless you plan on 
> spending a lot of time writing supporting code yourself. Some 
> companies have no issue with this but little old me can not be 
> bothered with it, when there are plenty of good alternatives 
> that get the job done as good.
>
> * I know one of the posters on this forum a bit more personal. 
> We have had some discussions about the different compilers. 
> Just as he used Go for his personal project, i used Crystal for 
> mine. We both found D too much trouble for the advantages it 
> gave.
>
> Its a vicious circle and i know it.
>
> Lack in people / contributors => No Packaging / Bugs / Issues 
> => New people scared away => Lack in people / contributors ....
>
> * D just is not sexy. I know D now from 10/2016 ( when i got 
> Ali's book. Programming in D ). Loved the book and language 
> syntax ( especially if you come from PHP ) but it was all the 
> rest that ruined it for me. And over the years D seems to have 
> been going down a direction that i hated. New features that had 
> no meaning for me, code breaking issues and resources being put 
> in features like BetterC, when all i wanted was a god darn 
> simple HTTP server that worked and kept working on release 
> updates. And more active packages.
>
> * On the subject of Programming in D, i noticed a lot of books 
> are old. BetterC, the feature where a lot of resources have 
> gone into, seems to be ignored in every book on the market.
>
> ------------------------------
>
> To give you a nice example how much of a irritation D can be 
> even today. Just right now, i tried to install D on Ubuntu 
> because i want to time the current D compile speed, vs a few 
> other languages. And i am following the official order ( 
> https://dlang.org/download.html ):
>
> 1. sudo wget 
> http://master.dl.sourceforge.net/project/d-apt/files/d-apt.list 
> -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/d-apt.list
> 2. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y 
> --allow-unauthenticated install --reinstall d-apt-keyring
> 3. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install dmd-compiler dub
>
> Guess what happens on Step 2.
>
>> Err:7 https://netcologne.dl.sourceforge.net/project/d-apt 
>> d-apt InRelease
>   The following signatures couldn't be verified because the 
> public key is not available:  NO_PUBKEY EBCF975E5BA24D5E
>
> And this issue was posted a LONG time ago.
>
> Yep ... Now try Go, Crystal, Nim, Rust, ... and a lot of other 
> languages. I have installed all those dozens of times and a 
> issue like simply do not show up or are fixed so fast, that it 
> never hits "me". But whenever it involves D, its always one 
> thing or another.
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Hopefully this explains things from my point of view, where D 
> simply fails me personally. Its late so i am off to bed.

+1

Same for me for everything you said.

I personally use D only for file processing scripts, first 
because D is very good at that, but also because this generally 
(but not always) prevents me from suffering from many of those 
problems you mentioned.

> * Focus upon C++ crowd, when very few C++ developers have any 
> interest in D. Hell, if a C++ developer wants to switch, they 
> have better alternatives with bigger or better growing 
> communities.

> Its a vicious circle and i know it.
>
> Lack in people / contributors => No Packaging / Bugs / Issues 
> => New people scared away => Lack in people / contributors ....

> * D just is not sexy. I know D now from 10/2016 ( when i got 
> Ali's book. Programming in D ). Loved the book and language 
> syntax ( especially if you come from PHP ) but it was all the 
> rest that ruined it for me. And over the years D seems to have 
> been going down a direction that i hated. New features that had 
> no meaning for me, code breaking issues and resources being put 
> in features like BetterC, when all i wanted was a god darn 
> simple HTTP server that worked and kept working on release 
> updates. And more active packages.

> Yep ... Now try Go, Crystal, Nim, Rust, ... and a lot of other 
> languages. I have installed all those dozens of times and a 
> issue like simply do not show up or are fixed so fast, that it 
> never hits "me". But whenever it involves D, its always one 
> thing or another.

Very well summarized...

I'm a C++ developer myself (even if these days I program mostly 
in C#), and obviously I'm using D as a better Python/Ruby, not as 
a better C++.

And as a "true" C++ alternative, D is far from being the best 
choice. I'd rather choose Rust, Zig and even Nim for my typical 
C/C++ use case, despite indeed it's obviously *possible* to use D 
for that, precisely because I know D's major pain points.

D being garbage collected, I once hope it would embrace the 
Go/Crystal wagon of those similar languages which have put their 
focus on web application developement, so that their base library 
is providing all the required building blocks (coroutines, http, 
etc) in such a way we can bery easily build our own web 
frameworks with just a few lines of code.

But I now understand that the focus is on "BetterC", not on 
"BetterGo"...