D is for Data Science

[Chris via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Tuesday, 25 November 2014 at 13:24:04 UTC, ketmar via 
Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Nov 2014 17:10:25 -0800
> Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d-announce
> <digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com> wrote:
>
>> I know it's a tough call. But I do see these sorts of comments 
>> regularly, and it is a fact that there are too many D 
>> libraries gone to seed that won't compile anymore, and that 
>> makes us look bad.
> but D wins in overall. being one of the architects in my 
> bussiness i
> was eagerly pushing D as our main development language. it's 
> good that
> this thing (and some other too) happens before i succeeded. now 
> we keep
> going with C++, as it fscks safety too, fscks principle of least
> astonishment, almost never fixes inconsistencies, but it has 
> alot more
> libraries and i can hire alot more programmers with it. i'm 
> still using
> D as a language for my hobbyst throw-away projects though, and 
> D is
> great for such things. D wins, 'cause i *almost* stopped 
> ranting (not
> only in this NG) and just accepting it as is. well, almost as 
> is, i'm
> applying alot of patches over vanilla D. this, of course, makes 
> my code
> incompatible with every other D compiler out here, but luckily 
> this is
> not a concern anymore.

"just accepting it as is" - Well, there's no need to do that. If 
there are issues, you're free to comment on them, make a feature 
request and/or fix them yourself. Everybody accepts any language 
"as is" as long as it's a mainstream language, regardless of any 
shortcomings or major annoyances. Your comment proves just that.

Just this week I was working on new software and I'm still amazed 
at how many options I have in D (and I keep discovering new 
options). D is always compared to C++ in terms of performance and 
libraries. Sure, there are more libraries (and by extension 
programmers) out there for C++. Performance might be better or 
worse, depending on the library and the programmer. However, The 
sheer abundance of options and modeling power in D is one of the 
reasons I stick with D. I deal with problems concerning language 
processing (grammar, rules etc.), i.e. mapping the human mind to 
a machine, and D always gives me a way to model complex and 
intricate systems. Sometimes I look at the code and think "How 
would I have implemented this in C, Python or Java?" I shudder 
and say "No way!" Believe it or not, modeling power, often 
overlooked, is one of the key features of programming languages 
of the future. Performance can always be improved. But modeling 
power is hard to add, if you don't have it already. Libraries, 
well, if you have strong modeling power, you can roll your own 
very quickly. Maybe an abundance of libraries is a sign that a 
language lacks modeling power.