Moving back to .NET

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 1 October 2015 at 16:00:29 UTC, Chris wrote:
> I agree that the D community raises the bar quite high for 
> itself and other people might get the impression that 
> everything is perfect, while it isn't. However, a lot of 
> complaints are about IDEs, one click installers (i.e. the 
> tools) and not about how D handles floating point numbers.

Well, I am less concerned about those that stumble on the 
doorstep. If that is enough to not carry on then they are most 
likely not motivated and can probably get their needs covered 
elsewhere. I am more concerned about those that use D for what it 
is particularly well suited for (systems and OS-level 
programming) and give up after writing some tools with it.

> Could you line out how you would like a language to be so it 
> doesn't bore you stiff?

Consistency in philosophy is important. If D is a compile time 
oriented library authors language (and I think it is) then that 
needs to come to the forefront so that library authors easily can 
write beautiful code and easily integrate D code with other 
environments. The runtime dependencies must be kept low and the 
focus on powerful and easy to use compile time resolution and 
static analysis has to be strengthened.

There is a lot of competition in this domain right now with 
C++17, Rust and some 3rd party things going on in the Go sphere 
on one side and Pony, Nim, Loci, Crystal and quite a few others 
upcoming projects. In addition a plethora of scientific languages 
and toolkits are appearing on the horizon thanks to commoditised 
JIT/backends. Even Haskell seems to be gaining a little bit of 
ground, doesn't Facebook use Haskell for spam detection or 
something?

With so many emerging languages it is important to stay true to 
ones strengths and not overfocus on application domains that most 
likely will be taken over by domain oriented high level 
programming languages in a ten year time frame.