What's the current state of D?

[Georg Wrede]

Walter Bright wrote:
> grauzone wrote:
>> But C++ programs still compile and run correctly with C++0x compilers.
> 
> True enough, but that wasn't true for C++98, or C89. Nobody refused to 
> use C or C++ because of that.

At the time, C[++] users didn't feel like they exactly had a choice, did 
they?

>> I bet none of the projects on dsource are even compilable with dmd2 
>> (even if they were written for D2.0).
> 
> Take any C++ project from 15 years ago and I bet it won't compile today, 
> either.
> 
>> And _many_ projects probably need minor fixes, before they compile 
>> with the latest dmd1 compiler.
> 
> Nearly all of those are due to inadvertent reliance on bugs in D1. You 
> see this quite a bit in the C++ world. Every time g++ gets updated, I 
> have to tweak something in my sources.
> 
> Every binary release of dmd is available for download. If you require an 
> unchanging compiler, it's trivial to operate that way. dmd isn't going 
> to auto-update itself and break your compiles.

Now, that is something the random user doesn't expect. Right? And his 
boss definitely not.

As part of our Public Front (as in "keeping up appearances", the 
TV-show), shouldn't we make it a point not to lose public awareness of 
such good things? (Meaning, it's not enough to have it mentioned in an 
obscure niche of a corner of a second-level reference to documentation.)

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** The following is way off-topic, so don't read it **
And it's written on a Saturday night, before the pub.

Yesterday, I got into a discussion about the merits of Picasso, Dali, 
and a third [local] painter. One of us had read the book written by 
Picasso's last wife. Picasso lived a life like any sane man would [or 
should] dream of: Wife, lover, and random paintees. Heads of state and 
celebrities bowing to their knees before him, etc. One day his wife and 
his mistress together approached him, stating that this can't go on, 
it's intolerable. You have to choose or do something!!!

Picasso looked at them, took a sip of his wine, a slow puff of his 
cigar, and then remarked "I'm fine." To their astounded faces, he 
continued "If the two of you have a problem, then go sort it out between 
yourselves."

No wonder he had it in hand. And, IMHO, with the crappy paintings he did 
[at the top of his time], nobody modest, honest and humble would have 
got a living off of that stuff.

________________________________________________________

What's the relevance of this story to us??  Well, it is all about how 
you handle things like the public opinion and the attitudes of folks 
around you. Even if D were an amateur language with bribed articles on 
CUJ and DDJ, with the right attitude, you could get away with having the 
world believe this is the Holy Grail of languages.

So, let's not do the opposite, please.

Things we have (like every binary release [and I assume, an implicit 
promise of keeping it that way] downloadable forever), the source code 
to /both/ the front end and the back end distributed every time -- for 
both reading example usage, learning by looking at unittests, and for a 
deep understanding of both the compiler and the library code in detail, 
... it's stuff like this we don't advertise enough. (( Of course, not to 
mention actual language highlights that are really smashing! But they're 
outside of this post.))

And the parts of D that are unique, we don't see them splashed all over 
the net either. It can and should be possible without the PR budget of 
Oracle, too.

Anybody over 40 knows that Pascal was an excellent language for 
programmming classes. (Yes, it was even created for that purpose, 
originally.) But then, nobody at all knows that out of all "known" 
languages, D is (by FAR!!) the one a university /should/ choose as the 
introductory language. Hah, and even fewer can imagine that D is the 
language they should use in advanced classes! And, thus, virtually 
nobody knows that being blessed with having originally learned a 
language that has the strength to carry you all the way from intro to 
PhD, makes you seriously privileged. And with a robust and solid mother 
tongue like this, forages into C++, Java, Ruby, Haskell, Scheme, ASM, 
and the like, will seem like a breeze, and don't destroy or *undo* /the 
very foundations of/ your world as a programmer.