D vs Java

[Niko Korhonen]

Georg Wrede wrote:
> (Walter,) anytime somebody doubts D as a superior Academic Language, 
> have them talk with me.
> 
> Another thing, if we can get D popular in the academia, both research 
> and teaching will gain a lot. And as an aside, 5 years after that, 
> who'll ever want to do programming in any other language???

Don't you think some high-level language of declarative nature such as 
Scheme, Haskell, Ruby or Python (or even Boo, O'Caml or Scala for that 
matter) would serve better as a first language?

Scheme and Haskell really concentrate on expressing computational 
problems in their own domain, hence reputed as "executable specification".

Even though D is very nice it really can't compete in "high-levelness" 
with the aforementioned languages. I personally see D more as a 
professional's tool for building real-life software as academic research 
language.

As a side note, unfortunately none of the academic research languages 
are used widely for building real-life software, although they are 
*designed* to allow easy expression of computational ideas, i.e. to be 
easy to use. I for one would be extremely happy of getting a chance of 
using something like Haskell at work. Come to think of it, I would be 
extremely happy to use D.

For some reason IT industry is both extremely sadistic and masochistic 
by insisting it's workers to use the worst languages available (C++) for 
all work (especially if the language doesn't suit the problem domain at 
all), constantly doing huge layoffs, offshoring and delivering products 
so bad and faulty that any traditional industry would be out of business 
  on the first day.

-- 
Niko Korhonen
SW Developer