D popularity

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Mon, 21 Jan 2013 02:00:12 +0100
"Rob T" <alanb at ucora.com> wrote:

> On Sunday, 20 January 2013 at 09:52:42 UTC, SaltySugar wrote:
> > Why it isn't popular?  We must popularize it. There aren't any 
> > tutorials with D, books and other stuff. How about writing a D 
> > programming forum?
> 
> I don't think the problem is purely a technical one as some may 
> be suggesting. For example, even if all the technical issues were 
> resolved, I doubt usage will increase much faster than they 
> currently are. It won't hurt to make things 100% production 
> ready, but I doubt that's the biggest hurdle to overcome.
> 
> With mountains of investment in existing C/C++ infrastructure, 
> who is going to make the leap to D? The cost of switching must be 
> far less than the cost of not switching.
> 

D does continue to face an uphill battle for mindshare: These days,
most people who write code prefer to use languages that accept ANY
grammatically-correct code and deliberately remain silent about all
mechanically-checkable problems they can possibly ignore. Apparently
this is because they prefer to manually write extra unittests so that
only a subset of these errors are actually guaranteed to get caught
(if there's any guarantee at all). I'm not joking: I genuinely wouldn't
be surprised if the next popular "advancement" in computer languages
involves a way for compilers to stay silent about all grammatical errors
as well as the semantic errors they already ignore *by design*.

As bizarre and tongue-in-cheek as all that sounds, most programmers
these days actually *DO* consider that to be vastly superior. (The
thought that large numbers programmers can be that stupid is something
I genuinely find disturbing.)

If I were a savvy businessman (read: no ethical fiber), I would
manufacture a line of fire alarms advertised as being 100% silent, and
therefore less bothersome and less inconvenient than the "old" kind,
and sell them exclusively to programmers. As long as I remember to
refer to the non-silent alarms as "old", and point out how
convenient and productive it is to not be bothered by pesky fire-alarm
sirens, I'd be guaranteed to make millions off of these short-sighted
suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hprogrammers. (I just threw up a little in my mouth
at calling them "programmers", but well, *technically* that's what
they...sort of...are.)

A roundabout way to say it, but I guess the point I started out trying
to make is this: The popularity of dynamic/interpreted/sandboxed/etc
languages *is* IMO one of the more significant roadblocks in the way of
D popularity. Silent fire alarms are what's hip, and here we are
peddling an old-fashioned sounds-and-lights fire alarm. We're pragmatic
instead of cool.