Why is D unpopular?

Ola Fosheim Grøstad ola.fosheim.grostad at gmail.com
Wed Nov 3 14:02:52 UTC 2021


On Wednesday, 3 November 2021 at 13:25:18 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
wrote:
> I think they not quite subtly played on FOMO.
> I think D also has a narrative actually:
>
> D: "You too can be financially independent by crushing the 
> competition with D and hard work. More power than C++."
>
> hence "Do It In D".

Does FOMO mean "fear of missing out"? Maybe, but I think they 
also played up to a dissatisfaction with system level programming 
being tedious, and alluding to the power of system level 
programming to programmers that had not gone there before. (D 
does too.) Go later distanced themselves from system level 
programming, when people saw that it was not suitable for that, 
and rightfully felt that they were mislead, but maybe they still 
benefited in terms of hype from the controversy?

D did receive quite a bit of hype for being a possible successor 
to C++ on Slashdot around 2006/2007 or so (at that point in time 
/. was more inclined to publish stories about new exciting tech). 
Basically, D was projected as become the language that would 
remove the complexities of C++ and make you more productive.  I 
doubt I would have looked at D if the connection to C++ wasn't 
used as a "marketing trajectory".


> The problem is that the (Go/Rust/Swift) stories speaks to more 
> people, like people in managerial positions.

At launch or now? Initially I think developers want to taste the 
latest and greatest and get a glimpse of the future. So when 
Apple or Google release a new language many will study it. I 
think many with an academic background got excited about Rust, 
just on paper, so the setup was blogger friendly.

Now, I think it is by and large critical mass. Go has a solid 
runtime for cloud micro services. Swift is a platform. Rust, a 
good choice when C++ is too low level and Go is too high.








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