One area where D has the edge

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 27 January 2015 at 13:02:06 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
> On Monday, 26 January 2015 at 22:05:55 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>>
>> I don't know F#.  I know what you mean, but I don't think the 
>> competition to D consists of crappy languages - there are some 
>> very smart and creative people with large resources working on 
>> them (putting aside the question of the tone one should adopt 
>> in public towards peers).
>>
> That's exactly what I'm saying.  Against C or C++, D looks 
> fantastic.  But those aren't great languages.  But what's the 
> argument for D beyond that?  How can people using non-awful 
> languages be persuaded to even have interest?

You will rarely hear me use the argument from popularity, but to 
recognise the triteness of saying they must be doing something 
right is not to say that people switching from C family cannot 
provide a nice source of fuel for D given the size of their 
language base, and the size of ours.  A language doesn't need to 
be all things to all people, just to be the best version of what 
it is meant to be, and to communicate that.

> And that's what bugs me; that even if D is good and has a lot 
> to offer, the pitch doesn't communicate it well.  The important 
> part of that exchange that I hoped people would fixate on was 
> this:

I fully agree.  But a teenager is not as poised as the young 
woman she grows into.  And it may be more important at one stage 
in life to focus on homework than popularity.  The more complex a 
creature is, the longer it may take to reach full maturity.  It 
would have been bad for D to be 50x as popular at this stage 
because that would have hurt its quality.  Too much noise, 
politics, and lowest common denominator stuff comes with being 
prematurely popular.  Also often self satisfaction and 
complacency.

You can't say that there has not been a frenzy of emphasis on 
presentation and cleanup in the past months.  A long way to go to 
be sure, but the journey has started.  One sinks a lot of work 
into something before seeing results - make a note in your diary 
for 2018 and look back and tell me the situation is not radically 
better...

> "I don't understand what the point of D is either because once 
> you've already accepted a GC there are better languages you 
> could use."
>
> This indicates to me that there's a problem of messaging.

Especially wrt GC, and memory management where it is a highly 
technical topic that depends on the use case, and where it is 
hard to know the situation for you before having experience of 
the language.  So FUD is very effective, and people love to 
explain why the kid on the fringe deserves his status because it 
makes them feel better about themselves.  And there is this 
tribal sense of GC as a Shibboleth - I am a native programmer, 
and I don't use GC.  (As Walter said, he used to think GC was for 
loser programmers who couldn't manage memory like a man - my 
paraphrase).

If one reads the threads on GC (and I have been doing so the past 
days), one hears mostly from gaming programmers.  That's an 
important market deserving of respect, and handy as a stress case 
for the language.  But its a small part of total potential use 
case domain, and I would love to hear more accounts of how people 
are managing fine with the GC as it is.  There were some 
insightful posts by Adam Ruppe, and we should pull them out into 
a GC wiki FAQ.



Laeeth.