Why all the D hate?

[dsimcha]

== Quote from retard (re at tard.com.invalid)'s article
> I believe D attracts people who want to leave their hand-mark in the
> language's design. The community members see that the language is in a
> constant 'work in progress' phase so they're dumping truckloads of
> feature suggestions before the language's author.
> These suggestions are mostly syntactical improvements taken from other
> languages because the community members rarely have any kind of knowledge
> in the field of programming language theory.

IMHO this is a good thing as long as the language designer has enough of a
backbone to know when to say no to things.  (Except for the @property debacle I'd
say Walter is such a language designer.)  Maybe it's just my engineering
background creeping in (like Walter, I have very little formal CS education and my
degree is in engineering) but I **don't want** a language designed heavily from a
theoretical perspective.  I want a language that will make it easy for me to write
efficient, readable, safe, terse, flexible and DRY code, not one that showcases
cutting edge theoretical comp sci achievements.  In fact the features of D that
seem most theoretically grounded (the pure/nothrow/const/shared type system stuff)
are my least favorite features of the language, largely because they interact so
poorly with generic programming, which is more of a practical feature IMHO.

> The SafeD spec needs to be beefed up quite a bit to be any useful for
> compiler writers.

Agreed.  The implementation needs improvement as well.  I refuse to take SafeD at
all seriously until I can at least use it with std.getopt.  I refuse to take it
very seriously until it integrates well with generic programming.

> I think having a SafeD environemnt on .NET/JVM might be
> an interesting exercise. However, the language doesn't have many
> interesting new features to justify its existence on either platform.

Don't D's compile-time introspection and generic programming abilities count for
something?  They're the biggest reason I use D over C# or Java, and AFAIK D is the
most mainstream language with a comparable level of compile time metaprogramming
ability.