Why D is not a popular language?

[Aaron]

On Sunday, 10 January 2021 at 18:41:40 UTC, Andre Pany wrote:
> On Sunday, 10 January 2021 at 18:25:35 UTC, aberba wrote:
>> On Sunday, 10 January 2021 at 11:00:29 UTC, Andre Pany wrote:
>>> On Friday, 8 January 2021 at 16:26:43 From a technical point 
>>> of view, D is in a very good shape and even more fantastic 
>>> additions are on the horizon for 2021:
>>>
>>> - named arguments
>>> - string interpolation
>>> - floating point to string conversion implemented in DRuntime
>>> - huge list of more features and fixes
>>>
>>> At this point of of time the community has the task to 
>>> increase the popularity of D. Other languages have companies 
>>> behind to spend money on advertising the language. For D, 
>>> this advertisements needs to be done by the community.
>>> We need more technical evangelists in the community.
>>
>> +1
>>
>> How do you think that can happen? (Assuming the DLF isn't 
>> involved)
>>
>> How do we grow and aggregate content on D?
>>
>>>
>>> This will increase the D community and therefore more 
>>> developers will join which e.g. develops the better QT6 
>>> integration or any other missing part.
>>>
>>> Kind regards
>>> Andre
>
> Some ideas:
>
> - (if you work for a software company) try to establish D.
> - if the company you work for already is using D, you could 
> make this public (in alignment with the public relations 
> department of your company).
> - create blogs/tutorials and post them on hn and r/programming. 
> There is far too less D content on this channels. If you have 
> done something, post it and speak about it.
> - try to speak about D as much as possible, everywhere
>
> Kind regards
> Andre

This is part of the problem, the community is expected to do the 
heavy lifting in regards to building a community. It's not the 
only time I've heard this either. They would rather have someone 
"step up" and do the work for them than doing the work 
themselves. So why is there no Qt bindings? Ask yourself why you 
don't write the bindings yourself and you have your answer. No 
one is going to spend their free time doing what is essentially 
gruntwork. Especially for such a large fast moving project. An 
easy workaround is to just use something that already has a good 
GUI implementation like C# instead. The end result will probably 
be better for it as well.

Anyways I would not recommend D to anyone and I won't be using it 
for any large projects going forward either. It is a nightmare to 
maintain. I had a C++ project I converted to D and have been 
actively developing for the last 5+ years. Ita a medoum sized 
project, about 100k lines. You are going to be dealing with 
problems you've never had to deal with any other programming 
language out there. It isn't for technical reasons either, it is 
just very bad project management. I dont know how many times I've 
encountered a problem, spent hours going down a rabbit hole just 
to find the root of the problem has been reported 10+ years ago 
and even though the community has come to the conclusion that 
half a solution is better than no solution, nothing ends up being 
done instead (by choice). I now maintain my own fork of LDC as I 
know others do. So I can't really say my project uses D anymore. 
I never thought I'd have to maintain a compiler when I first 
converted it to D, I have dreams that I convert the project back 
to C++. Anyways there's good reason why D isn't popular, you can 
argue what those reasons are. But from my first hand experience, 
that's why I won't be using D, and I'd never recommend tormenting 
my coworkers with the idea of it either.