Should I invest time in D?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:
> After years of procrastination, I at the end of last year 
> finalized Rey Valesa's great dlang/vibe tutorial   
> https://forum.dlang.org/thread/gnluupbilugncznkffuo@forum.dlang.org.
> I had planned to proceed with a deep dive into D.
>
> With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has 
> opened.
> I do not want to be a part of such community and the future of 
> D does not look good. The alternatives do not look good either.

D should be fine, companies have invested lots of time and effort 
into using and supporting D, it's not going anywhere.

If you were to invest time in the fork, that has a more 
questionable future.

The community is very good with people learning or using D. 
Peruse the learn forum, you'll see people answering questions all 
the time. We also have a discord server, where people get answers 
sometimes instantly (depending on time zone).

These forum arguments are all over making significant changes to 
the language, and leadership disagreements. And it's tainted with 
a certain element of bitterness from the people who have forked. 
Obviously, they want to announce that they made the right choice, 
but I think the way to do that is to make their fork into a 
useful thing, not to post diatribes here. That bitterness will 
eventually fizzle out, and they will succeed or fail on their own.

> Immature, boring, too restrictive etc. Is assembler the choice 
> if you want to add a low level language to your Intel toolbox?

I don't think any of those descriptors are appropriate to D. It 
was created in 2000, I think, so it's not immature (I've been 
using it on and off in a professional setting since 2007). 
Boring? I guess if you get excited only by writing boilerplate, 
it's boring ;)

Restrictive? If anything D is dinged for trying to be everything 
at once!

Oh, and D has inline assembler too, so you are covered there!

> I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  I 
> have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 
> 'Why should I use D?'. I am greatful for any polite answer:)

Roughly speaking, D is a language that can do every bit of 
everything. It can be used at a high level, or low level, it has 
every paradigm you can think of, save functional programming (but 
it does have a smidge of that as well). Have a place where you 
would normally pick C, C#, Java, C++, shell script, Python? D can 
fit in all those places instead. The one place where it's not 
there yet is WASM. Though it shines as a web server (vibe being a 
prime example).

And it's insanely addictive. Once you start using some of the 
features that D has, you will be ruined for other languages. So 
I'd say yes, give it a try. What's the worst that happens?

-Steve