I wish I could use D for everything

[Walter Bright]

bearophile wrote:
> Walter Bright:
>> D aims to reduce project costs by reducing training time and
>> shortening development time.<
> 
> I agree that this is very important. Helping the programmer avoid
> bugs and helping her to follow good design practices are among the
> most important qualities of a programming language, because in
> practical programming often most time (= money) is spent debugging
> programs and updating them.
> 
> But you are comparing D with C++, because programming in D1 is faster
> and often simpler than doing the same in C++.
> 
> But today most people use languages like Java, Python, C#, that often
> shorten developing time even more than D1. D1 is almost a system
> language, so it's not easy to compete with the productivity of
> application languages designed to put the programmer first and the
> CPU second.

I've tried to program in Java. It takes me considerably more time to get 
things done in it. That time is lost writing much more code because it 
is a less expressive language.

The other problem those "CPU second" languages have is that people often 
use them in a hybrid manner - Python for the logic, with C++ to speed up 
the slow parts. Doing that is a sign of desperation, as neither language 
is fulfilling the needs of the programmer.


> And D2 is not an easy&simple language, you need a good amount of time
> to learn/teach it, more than Java for example.

Being a simple language does not imply being a productive language. 
Heck, 6800 assembly is very simple (about 40 instructions), but it takes 
a lot of work to get simple programs correctly coded.

Pascal is another language that can be mastered in a few hours, yet is 
very unproductive because it's hard to get anything done in it.