Asked on Reddit: Which of Rust, D, Go, Nim, and Crystal is the strongest and why?

[Abdulhaq via Digitalmars-d]

>
> I really wish people would stop complaining about other 
> languages having the same features as D without giving credit. 
> It is impossible to figure out exactly where ideas from 
> features come from, but most features predate even C++ if being 
> first is the main point.

Hear, hear, is it so unlikely that one footstep should fall in 
the footprint of another?

>
> The hard part about designing an imperative language is not the 
> individual features, the palette is given. The hard part is 
> turning it into beautiful whole that is greater than the sum of 
> the parts. And that is important, but difficult (or impossible) 
> to achieve.

This is it. Great languages (IMO) have condensed their features 
down to the smallest set of orthogonal features that they could 
manage. This makes the language easier to reason about, to share 
code, to maintain code, to learn, to read code, even writing it 
is often easier!

Right now I feel that D is growing in 'features' and corner cases 
beyond the point where I want to explore it's depths. It's gone 
from a swim in the bay into crossing the Channel. I always think 
about Herb Sutters Guru of the Week column and how it made me 
think "ugh - too many oddities to learn". I could be wrong and I 
hope I am.

It's quite a nice twist that the thread discussing which language 
is better branched into what version of English is the right one 
- as if such a thing is meaningful. Arguing about definitions and 
terminology is surely such a useless diversion.