How an Engineering Company Chose to Migrate to D

[Ecstatic Coder]

> Man, proggit can be savage with the criticism. Every Nim/Rust 
> and the one Ada programmer have come out of the woodwork to 
> make sure you know their language supports nested functions. 
> You've seemingly got to be an expert in every current language 
> to write a comparison article that suggests D may have some 
> advantages.

I've read the criticisms about the choice of the alternative 
language on the Reddit page, and I think that most of them are 
finally quite unfair.

In my programming career, I've already used many strongly-typed 
languages (C, C++, C#, Java, D, Go, Rust, Nim, Crystal, Julia, 
Pascal, etc) for at least one professional or personal project, 
and I'm also convinced that D is a good alternative to EP, 
especially compared to C++, Go and Rust for instance.

Where I disagree with Bastiaan is on the rejection of the Pascal 
language itself, as there are other open-source Pascal compilers 
(GNU Pascal in EP mode) which could have been used and enhanced 
to match the company requirements, while preserving the company 
future for the decades to come.

IMHO, implementing a EP-to-D source code converter was probably 
more risky than simply extending an existing Pascal Compiler in 
that case.

Like everybody here, I hope that Bastiaan efforts will pay in the 
long term, but I'm not as optimistic as many here that this will 
end as a success story, as I'm not sure that his teammates will 
really enjoy working the automatically generated D code as much 
as on the original source code...