Why D is not popular enough?

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 30 August 2016 at 07:56:06 UTC, Markus wrote:

>
> Most of the (very good) articles in 
> https://dlang.org/articles.html compare D-features with C++. If 
> I want to learn how D templates work, I do not need to know 
> what is bad in C++-Templates.

True. Any C++ programmer interested in this topic will see the 
differences anyway (or refer them to the section "D for C++ 
programmers").

> From my point of view this misleading for people comming to D 
> first time. D is a mature full featured language by its own. D 
> has its roots in C++ (and C) but is full fledged now and should 
> represent its features and strength with continuously 
> referencing C++ and without this repetitive "without mistakes".

The D community always links D to C++, which makes D look like 
the eternal "wanna be" or "runner-up". D has developed its own 
"style" and should no longer be compared to C++ feature by 
feature. It's useless because it's no longer applicable.

> Many young people are looking for alternatives to the boring 
> Java Ecosystem. If you position D in the, from there 
> perspective, grandparents-language C++ edge, you will miss them.

You have a point there. It's been said time and again that trying 
to win over the C++ crowd (that has put years of work into 
mastering the language) will not generate many new D users (the 
odd one, alright). But D can attract users from Python and Java 
etc. It's time D became a bit more self-confident about its own 
achievements. It'd make more sense to compare D, in terms of 
outlook, features and solutions, to other newer languages like 
Nim, Go or Swift, because those new languages are the real 
competition, that's where people go when they look for new 
languages once they're unhappy with Java or Python or whatever.

The constant references to C++ are understandable, though, if you 
consider that both Walter and Andrei come from a C++ background, 
so the whole issue of C++ may loom larger in their minds than in 
yours or mine.