Andrei's list of barriers to D adoption

[Ethan Watson via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 08:00:30 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> Hi Ethan.

Ahoy.

> But don't you think that as a language D has intrinsically 
> matured quite slowly?  Sociomantic began in 2008,or 
> 2009,whenever it was,  but at the time given where the language 
> was that must have been quite a courageous decision if one 
> thought one might be using it to process large amounts of data.
>
> These is nothing wrong with maturing more slowly - indeed maybe 
> more complex creatures take time for everything to come 
> together. Things develop at their own pace.

Maturing slowly tends to be a counterpoint when I talk about it. 
And it's purely down to an information war thing. Compare to how 
C++ matures. And by matures, I mean the old dinosaur becomes more 
and more fossilized with age and is kept animated by cybernetic 
enhancements bolted on to the side in a haphazard manner. There's 
a lot of people I know that are fine with that because of 
entrenchment.

D is still ahead of the pack in terms of features. Communicating 
that, and why you should buy in to the better way, is a bit of a 
challenge. A colleague of mine complained that strings use 
another whacky operator (~) to join strings and it's just another 
way of doing string work, which came about because he hadn't 
looked deep enough in to the language to realise it's just normal 
array concatenation.

Yet despite being ahead of the pack, its slow adoption doesn't 
speak well for it. But there is precedent for slow adoption, at 
least in gaming. C++ was virtually unused until after the turn of 
the century, and now it's deeply entrenched. Moving to C++ was a 
pretty clear path forward for C programmers. Moving forward from 
C++? There's options (Rust, Swift, C#, D). And the other options 
have a far greater mindshare than D at the moment.