D vs Go in real life

[Chris]

On Monday, 25 November 2013 at 10:28:12 UTC, Joseph Rushton 
Wakeling wrote:
> On 25/11/13 11:10, Chris wrote:
>> That's my point. D had / has it all, while Java is bringing it 
>> in bit by bit
>> after years, and people have to re-learn Java with every new 
>> update. But maybe
>> that's by design, because there's a huge Java-certificate 
>> industry out there.
>
> D obtained it over years, too, and has been much less 
> constrained by the need to support a huge existing user-base

Yes, D could breathe, which only goes to show that 
commercialization can seriously slow down the introduction of 
useful features.

> ...  I think you are once again letting your distaste for 
> corporate management get the better of you ;-)

I agree, I wasn't clear about it. Corporate management does not 
mean that the product is bad. But it means that a bad product 
gets more attention, hype and finally users than a good product 
that is not developed within a big corporation. I think it is 
only logical that as soon as a language becomes a product 
designed within a corporation, the language's design may suffer 
from external factors that have nothing to do with language 
design itself. As you said, you have to support an existing 
user-base. There are marketing issues, the company offers courses 
(these have to be re-designed, if the language is being 
re-designed). There is a whole array of external factors that 
hamper the development of the language. It has nothing to do with 
my liking or disliking corporate thinking. It's just a logical 
consequence.

C# was Microsoft's answer to Java, to undermine Java and gain 
some market shares, and of course in order to do so, they had to 
make it (at least a bit) better. But strategic thinking and 
marketing played a big role, thus the language is naturally 
affected by it.

I'm sure that both C# and Java designers could tell us how much 
corporate thinking influences and impedes language design. I'm 
almost sure that there is some kind of "corporate ideology". I'm 
saying this as someone who actually liked Java and did a lot of 
Java programming.