Why is D unpopular?

[Walter Bright]

On 5/1/2022 12:37 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> On Saturday, 30 April 2022 at 17:14:24 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 4/30/2022 1:02 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>>> As if all those people doing CS research in programming languages needed D's 
>>> existence to notice what is know in academia for decades.
>>
>> Bjarne Stroustrup has a PhD in CS. Why didn't C++ have it? Why does every 
>> iteration of C++ make CTFE work more like D's?
>>
>> Why didn't any of the other mainstream native compiled languages have it? 
>> Fortran? Ada? Pascal? Modula 2? (The latter two by CS academic researcher 
>> Niklaus Wirth.)
>>
>> CTFE is a *huge* win. Why was this well-known thing languishing in complete 
>> obscurity?
> 
> C++ doesn't pretend to have invented features that have preceded it by decades, 
> other than what they might have taken away from D.
> 
> Other programming languages had other design goals, which is not the same as 
> clamming to have invented something.

That doesn't explain why C and C++ did not implement this well-known feature. 
Nor any of those other major native compilation languages I mentioned.

Instead, C went the route of macros. C++ did the Turing complete template 
programming language. I remember the articles saying how great C++ templates 
were because you could calculate factorials with them at compile time. I don't 
recall reading in them "geez, why not just interpret a function at compile time?"

But if you can find one that did, I'll buy you a beer at DConf, too!