Why is D unpopular?

[Paulo Pinto]

On Wednesday, 3 November 2021 at 17:36:19 UTC, harakim wrote:
> On Tuesday, 2 November 2021 at 17:35:08 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 2 November 2021 at 17:27:25 UTC, Dr Machine Code 
>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I think it's due to large ecosystem and the big corporations 
>>> with deep pockets that pushes them. But I'd like to know you 
>>> all opinions
>>
>> Yes, that's a big part of it. If you look at other languages 
>> that doesn't have the corporate backing, they are about as 
>> popular as D. Also, when something is developed in a proper 
>> organization, it also usually means some kind of functional 
>> management and a few developers that can do that full time.
>>
>> Python is kind of a outlier here, that has grown organically.
>
> I was thinking about this post for a while. What about R, Perl, 
> Ruby or PHP? I don't think even C++ had corporate backing out 
> of the gate. Which company backed Scala? Sun?
>
> It seems like Python is in good company and the 
> corporate-backed languages are the outliers.

C++ had the corporate backing from AT&T, being part of UNIX, thus 
all major C compiler vendors either adopted CFront, or tried to 
create their own compiler, one of the first ones was created by 
Walter.

All UNIX workstations had C++ compiler alongside C, Apple moved 
from Object Pascal to C++, Windows and OS/2 used C for low level 
code alongside high level frameworks in C++ like OWL, VCL and 
MFC, Borland had a MS-DOS C++ framework that remains famous to 
this day (Turbo Vision), BeOS and Symbian were written in C++, on 
the last MS-DOS days Watcom C++ was the compiler to go for game 
development.

PHP had the corporate support from Zope and all ISP across the 
world.

Python had the initial backing from Zope, followed by all major 
corporations like Google and Dropbox that kept paying Guido's 
salary.

Ruby was mostly ignored until Ruby on Rails stormed the world.