D - more or less power than C++?

[Jeremy]

In article <duab09$1arn$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
>
>I started a new thread for this:
>
>"Mike Capp" <mike.capp at gmail.com> wrote in message 
>news:dua67i$12cr$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
>> 7. D has all (well, most of) the power of C++
>
>I see this often and am a bit perplexed by it. What power do you feel is 
>missing?
>
>And what about the missing power in C++ - inline assembler, nested 
>functions, contract programming, unit testing, automatic documentation 
>generation, static if, delegates, dynamic closures, inner classes, modules, 
>garbage collection, scope guard?
>
>What does D have to do to have more power than C++? 
>

I'm not a power programmer, so I can't talk much about what their needs are --
it sounds like you've already gotten some good input on what could make it more
powerful. However, I think D is already powerful enough to be a big hit.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say Java isn't nearly as powerful as C/C++ is,
but Java is more popular than C++ (according to http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm).
It isn't so much about power as it is usability. With Java, you can just grab a
single SDK, and you have just about everything you need -- and it just works.
Comes with a nice IDE with all those cool completion features, and everything is
just rather intuitive. It is easy to find and add external modules, and they are
all auto-loaded. Java is a memory hog, and performance is generally much slower
than C/C++... but Java is so damn usable, they don't mind giving up memory/CPU
time. D is more powerful than Java already, and if it became as usable (or
more), who would need Java? D takes first place... and you have millions of
people writing libraries (in a nice, official format with a great and complete
standard D library) to help push that 'powerful' bar up over even naive C++
programmers. :)

Jeremy