Why is D unpopular?

[12345swordy]

On Monday, 8 November 2021 at 16:13:42 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> 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.)

class as a reference type makes sense as you are dealing with 
polymorphism. The only thing I see is unnecessary is the "*", 
which from my understand is intentional design by walter. Which 
according to him, it is to make porting c code to d easier. Yet 
we have import c now. So I don't know what he thinks of it now.

-Alex