State of D 2018 Survey

[Paulo Pinto]

On Friday, 2 March 2018 at 04:38:24 UTC, psychoticRabbit wrote:
> On Friday, 2 March 2018 at 03:57:25 UTC, barry.harris wrote:
>>
>> Sorry little rabbit, your are misguided in this belief. Back 
>> in day we all used C and this is the reason most "safer" 
>> languages exist today.
>
> You can write pretty safe code in C these days, without too 
> much trouble. We have the tooling and the knowledge to make 
> that happen.. developed over decades - and both keep getting 
> better, because the language is not subjected to a constant and 
> frequent release cycle.
>
> Ironically, the demands on programmers to adapt to constant 
> change, is actually making applications less safe. - and least, 
> that's my thesis ;-)
>
> The real problem with using C these days (in some areas), is 
> more to do with its limited abstraction power, not its lack of 
> safety.
>
> And also C is frowned upon (and C++ too for that matter), cause 
> most programmers are so lazy these days, and don't want to 
> write code - but prefer to just 'link algorithms' that someone 
> else wrote.
>
> I include myself in this - hence my interest in D ;-)
>
> Keep those algorithms coming!

Those tools exist since 1979, so C programmers have had quite 
some time to actually use them.

"To encourage people to pay more attention to the official 
language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and 
to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple 
mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his 
pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set 
of files and remarked on dubious constructions."

Dennis Ritchie, https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

Also, anyone that wasn't using safer systems programming 
languages before C got widespread outside UNIX, can spend some 
time educating themselves on BitSavers or Archive about all the 
systems outside AT&T that were developed in such languages since 
1961.

The first well known, Burroughs B5000, has kept being improved 
and is sold by Unisys as ClearPath nowadays.

Or PL/8 used by IBM for doing RISC research, creating an compiler 
using an plugable architecture similar to what many think are 
LLVM ideas and the respective OS. They only switched to C, when 
they decided to bet on UNIX for going commercial with RISC.

There are only two reasons we are stuck with C, until we get to 
radically change computer architectures, UNIX like OSes, and 
embedded developers that won't use anything else even at point 
gun.

All the quantum computing research is using languages that don't 
have anything to do with C.