Why is D unpopular?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Monday, 8 November 2021 at 15:57:30 UTC, jfondren wrote:
> On Monday, 8 November 2021 at 15:16:07 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> I'm honestly surprised anyone would want it any other way! :-D 
>>  (Being forced to do things one particular way is what drove 
>> me *away* from languages like Java.)
>
> I doubt that people do want it any other way; strictness is 
> seen rather as an easy to understand catalyst for what they 
> actually want:

You need consistency in the language in order to enable sensible 
meta programming. So there is a need for streamlining.

For instance, having three ways to express references is not 
necessary. (class, "*", "ref").

Ideally you would define a minimal core and express all other 
concepts through meta-programming, but add syntactical sugar 
where necessary. (Associative arrays could have been a standard 
library type with syntactical sugar.)