If D becomes a failure, what's the key reason, do you think?

[Don Clugston]

Dave wrote:
> Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:
>> IMO of course,
>>
>> Minimalistic D (v.1.0) should appear year ago or so (btw: it was 
>> perfect time for D on the market).
>> As far as I remember at that time when I started doing Harmonia D was 
>> just good enough for v.1.0 (compact and clean)
>>
>> All new features appeared after ( inner classes and further ) a) did 
>> not change picture in principle, b) did not expand
>> feature set dramatically, c) created impression of instability.
>>
>> One year of D design more and it will be dead. Our beliefs in D do not 
>> matter here.
>> Software market laws and psychology are that killers.
>>
> 
> IMO, in order for D to "die", there has to be something that would 
> supplant it, because I don't think the market for a "better than C & 
> cleaner than C++" statically compiled language has died. I'm not aware 
> of any language like that out there anyhow, certainly not in this stage 
> of development.

However, if D stays in beta indefinitely, it might as well not exist.

> That said there are some frustrations recently. What is frustrating me 
> the most is this 'immutable as default' thing and the lack of any 
> response from Walter on the issue. This would truly be a way to 
> differentiate D from C, C++, C#, Java and a host of other languages, and 
> Walter has spoken positively about it recently in other public news 
> groups, yet he won't even join the discussion here. I mean, if it 
> defeats one of the language goals (for instance, if it makes a D 
> compiler harder to implement than a C++ compiler) then that's all he'd 
> have to say and that would be good enough for me.

IMHO, the lack of details about 1.0 is the biggest problem. In 
particular, the uncertainty about the level of support we can expect for 
implicit function template instantiation makes template library 
development difficult.

> Perhaps Walter is completely heads-down right now trying to take care of 
> the bug list so he feels comfortable releasing v1.0. The problem with 
> that is that I'm getting the feeling that the language spec. itself may 
> not be good enough to be the next killer language in the C lineage. 
> Something like 'const by default' would at least be worth a try in this 
> regard.
> 
> Don't get me wrong - D is absolutely great incrementally (one of the 
> goals), but IMHO there probably will have to be a major differentiator 
> for it to really catch fire.

It's all in the libraries. D is a fantastic language to write libraries 
for. That's where you get the benefit from all the incremental 
improvements. If const-by-default enables the creation of much better 
libraries, then it's worth the pain. If it doesn't, don't do it.
Ruby had this huge surge in popularity not because of the language, but 
because of the library Ruby On Rails. Developing good libraries requires 
a stable language, and we don't have that right now. The 
protection/module system seems to be completely broken.