boost crowd.

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 11/27/11 10:32 AM, so wrote:
> Whenever i see articles like
> http://cpp-next.com/archive/2011/11/having-it-all-pythy-syntax/ i keep
> wondering why they are so silent in this newsgroup,
> I am sure they keep an eye on D. I would expect some kind of
> contribution (as in suggestions, proposes...).
> They are the top C++ developers, pushing language's capabilities. So, if
> someone is annoyed by the limits of C++, that would be them.
> Forget everything, i was thinking that the generic capabilities of D
> alone is enough to attract all the boost crowd.
>
> Phew, had to get it out.

The dynamics and psychology at play are, IMHO, a fair amount more 
complex. I'm saying this as one who has lived such.

Mastering a difficult language (and probably skill in general) is to 
some extent like acquiring some power or money - it puts the subject in 
a conservative position where she'd try to expand the use of the 
language for tasks not playing into the language's strength, as opposed 
to achieving the tasks by escaping the language. That explains e.g. why 
people are willing to use C++'s preprocessor for tasks that would be 
trivial for m4 or even bash, or that people try all sorts of 
systems-level coding in languages not adequate for that.

I've had a sort of awakening during my first year in grad school. A 
professor was teaching constraint logic programming (CLP) and I noted to 
him that many CLP constructs could be expressed in C++ templates quite 
nicely. (That prediction was correct, see 
http://www.mpprogramming.com/cpp.) He (knowing my past) suggested kindly 
that I'd do good to think more broadly instead of trying to emulate 
everything I come across in C++. And right he was.

Many C++ programmers have heard about D, but it would be naive to think 
they'd just stop looking solutions to problems in C++, just because 
those problems have a good solution in D.


Andrei