I love D

[Imperatorn]

On Sunday, 24 September 2023 at 09:16:27 UTC, evilrat wrote:
> On Sunday, 24 September 2023 at 07:27:39 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:
>>
>> I wonder why D isn't more popular.
>>
>> Also we have arsd, so it's an automatic win.
>
> I think major points is:
>
> 1) most devs are web related - this means that even when using 
> existing solutions there is demand on single-file binary 
> distributions that can be deployed on target 
> node(infrastructure management, clouds, etc...) without hassle, 
> sure it is doable in D but people are lazy so they just choose 
> Go and won't bother, esp. with such poor IDE's and debugging 
> experience in D.
>
> 2) Since this unity fiasco last week I see many unity 
> developers coming to godot and ask if there C# feature for this 
> or that, how can they drop everything they made in godot 
> without doing extra work, and some even demand to drop built-in 
> scripting language and make C# the only choice.
> I can't objectively say anything neutral so no comments, but 
> this situation shows the mentality as well.
>
> (I must to say though there are wide gap between their skills, 
> and truly experienced devs already showing some cool stuff made 
> with godot on a level that I haven't seen before.)
>
> 3) Fresh programmers are looking at tooling first, more 
> specifically jetbrains level IDE for the language they are 
> going to use(or just invest their time to), this whole story 
> when reading tons of reddit comments(and tech related QA 
> boards) becoming very frustrating as people won't even consider 
> using anything other than rust, go, or the very least C++, of 
> course for that enterprise development there is basically only 
> two options - Java and C#.
> There is also demand on readily available 
> components/scripts/code assets from non-tech people who just 
> wants to make something and don't want getting their feet wet 
> from dealing with all this "tech stuff".
>
> So basically these 3 points are all intertangled, in short:
> D isn't yet mature enough, it is not yet polished enough for 
> wide masses, the convinience and tooling "just sucks"(tm).

Web api can be made super easy with arsd.cgi. And I would say 
it's even better than C# that I use every day in terms of size 
and speed.

However, what D lacks is tooling. For example, let's say I want 
to persist data somewhere.

Modern solutions (C# and friends) have various ORMs that make it 
super easy. Both model first (I usually do this initially) or 
code first.

And if I want to change from MySQL to SQL or Postgres or 
whatever, I can count on that there will be a package for that 
and that it will take 5 minutes max to change, most of the time 
it's just to change config.

In D, I don't know what the status is. My feeling is that it's 
"almost there".

The language is mature enough, that's not the problem. It's the 
surrounding tooling and infrastructure.

For example, when develop, I expect things to "just work", like 
debugging without even having to configure anything, symbol 
lookup on hover, code completion without hassle, refactoring 
capabilites, easy profiling, remote debugging, dependency 
incjection etc etc.

I'm just writing some things from the top of my head. But I think 
you get the point.

In summary, D as a language is mature. D as a complete developer 
experience is not yet mature enough, but I hope it will be soon, 
because D 100% has a place in the modern world.