Is D painted into a corner?

[Lance Bachmeier]

On Thursday, 28 August 2025 at 18:47:19 UTC, Brother Bill wrote:
> It seems like 'templates' are the 'Achilles heel' of D.
>
> Without starting a flame war, has D gotten to the point where 
> ordinary mortals have difficulty coding in D with 'templates' 
> such as 'cycle' requiring rewrites into 'myCycle'?

Templates are in general a horrible way to program. Therefore I 
don't use them very much. When I do, I don't do anything 
complicated. But everyone has their opinion on that. I similarly 
don't use attributes. I prefer simple code with a simple 
language. Hard to avoid ranges in Phobos, which can be crazy 
complex/inconvenient at times, but every language has its warts.

> Does D now require 'deep' memory into layers of history and 
> workarounds?

Not if you stick to the simple parts, like interfacing with C and 
writing scripts.

> Is D a general purpose language, suitable for Application 
> Programming, or does it have a more limited scope?

Yes. I use it for scripting and numerical programming 
(specifically, statistical work). Great for those use cases. Once 
you get into the complexities of templates and attributes and all 
that "stuff" you've lost the battle. Oh, and it has a garbage 
collector that you can use or not use, that's great too.