Questionnaire

[Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On 02/08/2017 01:27 PM, Ilya Yaroshenko wrote:
> 1. Why your company uses  D?
>
>    a. D is the best
>    b. We like D
>    c. I like D and my company allowed me to use D
>    d. My head like D
>    e. Because marketing reasons
>    f. Because my company can be more efficient with D for some tasks
> then with any other system language

x. Because I'm self-employed so I get to choose the best tool for the 
job instead of whatever some know-nothing manager thinks "must be good 
because its popular". Also, all of the above.

> 2. Does your company uses C/C++, Java, Scala, Go, Rust?

Not when I can help it.

> 3. If yes, what the reasons to do not use D instead?

If, for whatever reason, my hands are tied and it's just not a 
possibility. Usually platform/framework compatibility. Or somebody above 
me deciding "You must use language X". (But, after having had more than 
enough PHP/VB/Java/C++/Python/etc in my life, I'm more inclined now to 
simply avoid situations that would involve such restraints. Life's too 
short to suffer bad tools for bad reasons.)

> 2. Have you use one of the following Mir projects in production:

No. I keep hearing about Mir, but still haven't quite wrapped my head 
around what it is, or how/where to use it. (and that bugs me)

> 3. If Yes, can Mir community use your company's logo in a section "Used
> by" or similar.

N/A

> 4. Have you use one of the following Tamedia projects in your production:
>
>    a. https://github.com/tamediadigital/asdf
>    b. https://github.com/tamediadigital/je
>    c. https://github.com/tamediadigital/lincount

First I've heard of them. I'll take a look.

> 5. What D misses to be commercially successful languages?

A groupthink mentality and loads of bad ideas and broken reasoning. Ie, 
the basic requirements for anything to be popular in the computing arena.

Seriously. I'm not joking.

Well, that and, nobody's ever really been in a situation where they're 
more or less FORCED to use D. Many, heck probably most, big-name 
languages got big because there were enough people who didn't have much 
of a choice:

- Earlier days of Unix/Linux dev? Hard to avoid C/C++.
- Work for a company that's heavily invested in MS tools? Hard to avoid 
VB (90's) or C# (2000's).
- Work for a non-MS-based enterprise? Hard to avoid Java, because that's 
what the higher-ups had already been sold on.
- Need to use a relational DB? SQL, period.
- Need client-side scripting on a web page? JavaScript, period (until 
just recently).
- If you wanted an MVC web framework, for a short while Ruby was the 
only choice. I guarantee Ruby would be more popular today if that time 
period had been longer. It's undeniable nobody would've ever heard of 
Ruby were it not for Rails.
- Need to run something on an affordable commodity server in the late 
90's/2000's? PHP, period. Unless you paid an extra $5-$10/mo. and 
restricted your choice of providers - then you could use VBScript/ASP, 
which was basically the same exact thing as PHP, but just incompatible.
- Need low-level hardware access, memory management or other direct 
control over performance and resource usage? Until recently, had to be 
C/C++.

Then once onboard, stockholm syndrome sets in. Instant popularity.

Coercion (and perceived coercion[1] for that matter) makes technologies 
popular far more than any other factor. The computing sector is NOT a 
meritocracy, not by a longshot. That right there is D's #1 biggest 
marketing flaw, period. If you nail that coercion part, it doesn't 
matter HOW badly you do on any other technical or marketing aspect. Been 
proven time and time again. And if you DON'T have that coercion, you 
face an uphill battle no matter how good you do on technical and 
marketing fronts. Also been proven time and time again.

[1] The "I must keep up or get left behind" thought train. See also 
"Cover Fire" and the Fire and Motion stuff here: 
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

> 6. Why many topnotch system projects use C programming language nowadays?

Partly inertia, but also because there was a decade or two (that only 
ended a few years ago) where nearly all language designers obsessed over 
VMs and eliminating low-level capabilities, and in general dumbing down 
their languages to the point of uselessness for anyone but novices, 
hobbyists, and those who could afford to throw money/hardware at any and 
all performance/resource/scalability issues[2]. Because of that, for 
many C/C++ users, there simply was no realistic alternative, period.

[2] I'm sure 90's Sun LOVED their JVM/Java - it virtually guaranteed 
"optimization" could only mean "rent/buy more hardware" - Everything 
else besides reducing algorithmic complexity was deliberately banned by 
both the language and the VM...as a self-proclaimed "feature" no less. 
That "feature" allegedly being for safety, but decades of security 
patches and exploits for every VM on the planet proved that to be a load 
of...male cow.