How an Engineering Company Chose to Migrate to D

[user1234]

On Saturday, 23 June 2018 at 09:41:19 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
>> 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...

Yes but their job is to make boats floating (like said Veelo at 
Dconf 2017, not writing compilers. Pascal lags behind and not a 
few, in term of expressiveness.
Also transpilation of Pascal to something else is simple because 
no semantic is needed.