D, Java? To D or not to D?

[Leandro Lucarella]

Walter Bright escribió:
> Waldemar wrote:
>> == Quote from Walter Bright (newshound at digitalmars.com)'s article
>>> BCS wrote:
>>>> D is alos ~7 years old, is at V1.00 and is being develuped by one man
>>>> with gobs of user input and AFAIN not a lot of funding. It is useful 
>>>> for
>>>> practically anything.
>>> D's funding: $0
>>> D's paid staff: 0
>>> D's marketing budget: $0
>>> <g>
>>
>> How did Guido do it?
> 
> I don't know (I don't know anything about the history of Python).

Python was a good language, I took more than 10 years (or more) to 
spread out because of the lack of marketing (and the lack of internet 
popularity, not so many people had an internet connection back then). 
Same for Ruby (it's from 1995 but I'm sure you hear about it a couple of 
years ago because of RoR). It only took time, I guess.

The key is the language to be good (and I think D is), then, sooner or 
later, people will notice and start using it. As much as the people know 
it start to spread the word, the sooner this will happen.

Another way to help D to become popular is to write good opensource 
libraries and applications, specially libraries, almost all popular 
languages have a good base of libraries (and the most popular ones have 
good and large *standard* libraries. Of course D counts with all the C 
libraries (which is *a lot* and a great base), but you can't tell people 
to use raw C libraries because they are ugly to use and you lost a lot 
of D power, so I think wrappers (to make them feel comfortable and D'ish 
to work with) will be essential. Or, since D is a system programming 
languages, porting them could be an option too, but this libraries 
probably wont be as popular as C ones until D compilers are available on 
every platform like C compilers are now (and I really don't think this 
will happen in less than 20 years, if it ever happens at all).

Anyway, I think that, with 1.0 out there, there's time to work on useful 
library base and to spread the word so D community grow fast (which is 
essential to success on the first point :).

-- 
Leandro Lucarella
Integratech S.A.
4571-5252