Future(s) for D.

[Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d]

On 06/20/2015 11:12 AM, ketmar wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Jun 2015 14:00:47 +0000, Etienne wrote:
>
>> Yep, looks like we already have better. I don't understand how D hasn't
>> fully picked up in Web Dev at this point. Are they expecting an
>> e-commerce/blogging/cms platform to go with it?
>
> D is just not ugly enough. the key to be popular (not only in webdev) is
> to make tech dumb, ugly, bloated, slow, inconsistent. choose any three or
> more.
>

Dangit, I was just gonna post the same thing :)

More seriously though (and this may sound like cynicism, but in my 
observation it really is true), webdev (and often computing in general) 
is all about fashion and "buzz". Merit has very little to do with it.

Making it big in this arena isn't about being the best, or even 
necessarily being good. That's been proven time and time again. It's 
about winning a popularity contest. So that's what's needed. I don't 
think there's any sure-fire way to pull that off, it's something that 
differs in each case, and requires hitting just the right variables, 
often by pure chance.

But something that typically seems to help is a big killer app (ex, 
facebook has been a major reason why people continued to choose PHP even 
*after* PHP became known-bad and facebook moved to hiphop), or some 
other one-liner buzzworthy note (ex: "Go comes from Google").

Of course, catering to the lazy and the inexperienced also seems to help 
a lot on the web, too. I think that explains why so many of biggest 
languages there are the ones have ex., no static typing, implicit 
variable declarations, etc.

D by contrast is a known static-typed language, and C/C++/Java have 
ruined the "street cred" of static typing. Dynamic is the greasers, and 
static is the nerd with taped-glasses and pocket protector. Same goes 
for with whitespace-based syntax versus semicolons/braces. So right 
there, D already has an uphill battle trying to be "sexy". And "sexy" is 
exactly the one thing that wins over most of the people in the tech 
world these days. (Well, inertia counts for a lot of people, too. Hence 
the Java houses, C++, cobol, and such at some of the mega-corporations 
and companies in the more conservative industries.)