Why is D unpopular?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Monday, 8 November 2021 at 08:07:54 UTC, rumbu wrote:
> One of the big mistakes - in my opinion - was the involvement 
> of language maintainers in the standard library design which is 
> a very different animal. Language maintainers must provide the 
> minimal blocks in the standard library and let the crowd design 
> the rest of content as they consider. This will allow, for 
> example, the gc crowd to abuse the garbage collector if they 
> want so, but also the !gc crowd to get rid of it. The future 
> will prove if D really needs a garbage collector or not. The 
> language maintainers need just to publish some rules and that's 
> all.

Yes, I think this is correct. I never understand why people claim 
that Tango was a big issue. I was only interested in low level 
programming and did not use Tango, it was too high level for me, 
but I never saw it as a limiting factor.

I was more interested in using C libraries than D libraries.

> Probably you will say that's ok, the crowd is free to design 
> their libraries, just push it on code.dlang.org. In reality 
> this is a graveyard (or the morgue, if we count 
> std.experimental as the graveyard). Why projects are dead, 
> simply because they are not officially blessed by the language 
> maintainers and not included in the standard library.

I think the idea was to replicate the success of Python, but in 
Python speed does not matter, it is all about convenience and 
stability. So that is essentially not possible for D where people 
have very different requirements (in comparison to Python). Also, 
developing a standard library like Python has takes a lot of time 
and effort, and you need critical mass to do it (or financial 
backing).

> - because the language didn't evolve in the last 13 years;

Yes, it is growing, but not really evolving.