C++ to catch up?

[Don via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 4 February 2015 at 03:52:26 UTC, Laeeth Isharc 
wrote:
>> Excellent post. This situation is very obvious to us at 
>> Sociomantic, as we're at the forefront of a massive disruption 
>> that is happening in the advertising industry. D has far 
>> better prospects in disruptive technology, rather than trying 
>> to compete with incumbents in the rapidly disappearing 
>> traditional desktop market.
>
> Thanks, Don.  I am honoured that you took the time to read 
> through all of this, and appreciate the feedback.  Every now 
> and then I question whether I am headed in the right direction 
> to use D (not because of anything lacking in D, but because it 
> is less conventional, and because I have been away from the 
> pulse of technology for a very long time).  Your industry is a 
> little different, and my needs for the time being are not even 
> soft real-time (although that could easily change).  But from 
> listening to your talk, I am pretty sure you know what you are 
> doing, and wanting high productivity when dealing with 
> potentially quite respectably sized data sets is one shared 
> aspect - so that is a source of comfort.

Thanks! Yes, I think that larger data sets are not well served by 
existing languages. And ease of handling large data is actually 
more significant than raw performance. Domains like ours are at 
least as much I/O bound as CPU-bound, and ability to adapt 
rapidly is very important.

> Could I ask you one thing, not directly relating to D?  Why did 
> you pick Berlin to launch your startup?  (You in the corporate 
> sense, I mean).

Perhaps Berlin chose the company, rather than the other way 
around :)
The companies' founders all grew up in East Germany, I think they 
were just living in Berlin.
But, there are a huge number of startups in Berlin. It's a place 
with great infrastructure, low costs, and available talent. So 
it's certainly an attractive place to launch a startup.

>> "First published in 1997, Christensen's book suggests that 
>> successful companies can put too much emphasis on customers' 
>> current needs, and fail to adopt new technology or business 
>> models that will meet their customers' unstated or future 
>> needs" -- 
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
>>
>> I thought: "they put too much emphasis on backwards 
>> compatibility" ...
>
> Haha - I know you have been one of the proponents of breaking 
> changes.  I think that is a distinct question from the other 
> stuff, and guess it is not easy for the language leaders to 
> balance the different demands - impossible not to make one 
> group unhappy.  Someone cynical might say it is easier for you 
> take that position if you are still mostly on D1, and so don't 
> pay the same price others would.

Yes, that's true, and so my opinions should be slightly weighted 
downwards. But even so, the reality is that bugfixes cause 
breakages anyway. Most code that isn't actively being maintained, 
is broken already. If you're an early adopter, you expect to have 
a lot of breakage pain.

The thing that is frustrating is when decisions are made as if we 
were much further along the adoption/disruption cycle, than where 
we actually are.
We don't yet have huge, inflexible users that demand stability at 
all costs.
There was widespread agreement on this, from all of the eight 
companies at DConf who were using D commercially.

> Breaking changes aside, one can't say there isn't a sustained 
> dynamism to the development of D.

Yes. Though I wonder if we are putting too much emphasis on being 
a replacement for C++; I fear that the better we become at 
replacing it, the more we will duplicate its problems. But that's 
just a niggling doubt rather than a well-reasoned belief.