D programming language popularity

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On Sunday, 11 October 2020 at 11:24:42 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:
>
> D is not present anywhere in languages to learn... Why?
> (I get that it can be a chicken and egg problem)
>
> When looking for languages to learn, you have to start 
> "somewhere".
>
> How do we make D part of this "somewhere"?
>
> Thanks

I want to add my 2 cent as newbie:

- For plain applications, D looks quite similiar to C++, C# but 
is less popular. It this a benefit?

- It's likely that users need a library. This library may exists 
as D code but even the search for that library is not intuitive. 
You have to try multiple terms or browse manually for the 
library, this is bad. Also the library seems to be outdated while 
the C library developers just did a new release and you could 
assume the D-lib is just dead. This makes D look more like an 
experiment than a living standard.

- The offical library reference is visually "unfriendly". For 
example, devdocs.io do a better job. On the D-site, it looks not 
well formatted. I am loosing focus while reading on some 
locations. The search engine is unsatisfying. Even that I can't 
format code in forums bothers me, because that are standard 
features and they just not there. This appears as "unfinished", 
we are not in year 1998.

- D also needs a new modern, _just working_ IDE with syntax 
highlighting, formatting, autocomplete hints, quick 
documentation. I've tried the Dlang IDE, VisualD, WebFreak-D or 
other Plugins for Visual Studio and IDEA. Plugins either do not 
work well, get broken with never versions (eg. MonoDevelop) but 
also true for VS Code. You see quickly that event VisualD is just 
a plugin which is buggy, crashes and does not really integrate 
well (sepearate build options, passing arguments ignored, etc). 
Also realtime debugging is a pain, eg with VisualD: If you are 
lucky it will display the stack correctly - but it has problems 
with template functions and it show your structs in initial state 
rather actual value. I could not run the debugger in VS Code, it 
runs/breaks but shows nothing and it's not my job to report bugs 
to plugin-devs that just don't have the time to fix them. I could 
also only run partial debugging on IntelliJ IDEA since variables 
are not updated on change - there is always such an issue and the 
list goes on...

Of course this is offtopic by the language itself but it has a 
heavy influence if I would try a new language which tools are 
only working on the command line out of the box. You may get the 
point, if you want to attract new users, you need a supported, 
working welcome packet just as an IDE with friendly features so 
the users can just start making experiences.