D vs Go in real life

[Chris]

On Thursday, 21 November 2013 at 12:14:09 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> On Thursday, 21 November 2013 at 11:07:15 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> On Thursday, 21 November 2013 at 09:57:35 UTC, Bienlein wrote:
>>> On Thursday, 21 November 2013 at 09:33:04 UTC, Bienlein wrote:
>>>> What puzzles me is the enormous activity in the Go forum. 
>>>> Only
>>>> the Python forum has that much traffic. It seems to me that
>>>> people are all that happy if they have a language with which 
>>>> they
>>>> can just start hacking around on something.
>>>>
>>>> That is because Go doesn't force anyone to think about 
>>>> design.
>>>> The only design-level construct it has is the class an 
>>>> that's it.
>>>> Embedding is truly only to save coding effort not having to 
>>>> type
>>>> in dereferenciation chains as in C. There is nothing except
>>>> classes, but no inheritance, traits, mixins, overriding, 
>>>> etc. So
>>>> there is nothing that forces you to think about your design 
>>>> in
>>>> Go. And you don't have to know about manual memory 
>>>> management as
>>>> in Rust.
>>>>
>>>> -- Bienlein
>>>
>>> I forgot to say that I really don't know what this will end 
>>> up in
>>> ...
>>
>> I'm wary of languages that are hyped by big companies or the 
>> web programming community. First there was Java which is still 
>> getting face lifts and plastic surgery. Then there was Ruby, 
>> "the way to go", but it hasn't convinced me yet. If all these 
>> languages are "soooo good", why do people still feel the need 
>> to come up with new solutions (cf. all the new languages for 
>> the JVM)? The answer is probably "tunnel vision" design and 
>> development. The language designers offer one ideology and 
>> users don't have to think when designing their programs. 
>> Simple as that. If you have a big company to back this up, 
>> people will think "it's THE ultimate best ever" language. 
>> Personally, I enjoy the freedom of D programming, even though 
>> with this freedom come tough questions as to the design of the 
>> program.
>
>
> You mean like C and C++ were by AT&T? Or FORTRAN and PL/I/M by 
> IBM?
>
> Java was not the first one.
>
> Languages need a corporate sponsor or a killer framework to 
> gain market share.

D's advantage is that there is no committee, laboratory or 
marketing department that decides which features to implement. 
It's as close to a grassroots thing as you can get, I think.

> Luckily we can now point to Facebook as possible corporate 
> sponsor.

But that's post-factum. The language already happily exists 
outside the corporate sphere, unlike Java that was a product from 
the very beginning.

> --
> Paulo