Why is D unpopular?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Jun 10, 2022 at 07:22:51PM +0000, mw via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> How come the DMD frontend is in such terrible state?

Because:

	https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/

Selected quotes:

	[...] you can ask almost any programmer today about the code
	they are working on. “It’s a big hairy mess,” they will tell
	you.  “I’d like nothing better than to throw it out and start
	over.”

	Why is it a mess?

	“Well,” they say, “look at this function. It is two pages long!
	None of this stuff belongs in there! I don’t know what half of
	these API calls are for.”

	[...]

	Yes, I know, it’s just a simple function to display a window,
	but it has grown little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows
	why. Well, I’ll tell you why: those are bug fixes. One of them
	fixes that bug that Nancy had when she tried to install the
	thing on a computer that didn’t have Internet Explorer. Another
	one fixes that bug that occurs in low memory conditions. Another
	one fixes that bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy
	disk and the user yanks out the disk in the middle. That
	LoadLibrary call is ugly but it makes the code work on old
	versions of Windows 95.

	Each of these bugs took weeks of real-world usage before they
	were found. The programmer might have spent a couple of days
	reproducing the bug in the lab and fixing it. If it’s like a lot
	of bugs, the fix might be one line of code, or it might even be
	a couple of characters, but a lot of work and time went into
	those two characters.

	When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are
	throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes.
	Years of programming work.


T

-- 
If lightning were to ever strike an orchestra, it'd always hit the conductor first.