Where will D be in 2015 in the programming language ecosphere?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"dsimcha" <dsimcha at yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:hvjno9$2oq3$1 at digitalmars.com...
> == Quote from Justin Johansson (no at spam.com)'s article
>> Me thinks this both a polite question and a question due of realistic
>> answers.
>> How doth thou respond?
>
> My brutally honest but not overly pessimistic view is that D will become 
> fairly
> popular in "high-level" systems programming and scientific and game 
> programming,
> but will fail to make substantial inroads into "low-level" systems 
> programming or
> most application programming.
>

I think that sounds like a fairly reasonable analysis.

> For the lower-level systems programming case, the requirement for
> a runtime (even if it's a fairly lightweight one) and the lack of fine 
> control
> over things like binary size (due to templates, etc.) will limit 
> usefulness.  Yes,
> these problems can be worked around, but doing so requires sticking to so 
> much of
> a C-like subset that you may as well just use C.
>

(Way) Back when I was a C/C++ programmer, I found D's module system alone to 
be worth abandoning C/C++. Everything else was icing on the cake. And there 
are other things that would also be an improvement for these developers: 
better alternatives to preprocessor macros, underscores in numeric literals, 
improved const/immutable system. So, while I agree that many of them would 
need to use a limited C-ish subset of D, I do think it would still be 
worthwhile for many of them to switch. But of course, as for how many of 
them will actually agree, I'm not sure.

Also, I predict Bjarne Stroustrup will become even more absurdly defensive 
of C++'s anachronisms and cruft than he already seems to be ;)