Quora: Why hasn't D started to replace C++?

[Atila Neves]

On Friday, 9 February 2018 at 13:08:25 UTC, Bo wrote:
> On Thursday, 8 February 2018 at 03:36:17 UTC, Laeeth Isharc 
> wrote:
>> But really who is selling D to anyone? We are very far from 
>> that stage right now.  Did someone sell D to Microsoft COM 
>> team, Remedy or to Weka? Nope.  People who had earned the 
>> authority to decide became aware of the language end decided 
>> to use it.  And they did so because for them it solved their 
>> particular problems better then anything else they could think 
>> of.
>
> The question one needs to ask is more: how long ago have those 
> developers decided to use D and why is the technology not more 
> widespread in those companies.
>
> If D solved the issues in those companies, you expect to see a 
> increased switch to a language.

That conclusion relies on the assumption that programmers / 
managers / tech leads / CTOs choose programming languages based 
on technical merits alone. While there are certainly people who 
do that, in my experience they are in a small minority.

There's inertia, tribalism, sunk cost fallacy, fear of the 
unknown, fear of change, lack of wanting to invest time in a new 
technology, "if it ain't broke don't fix it" (touted many a time 
by people who either ignore security exploits or justify it 
saying it's not the language's fault but bad programmers), 
popularity, herd mentality, ...

Unit tests are a great idea, right? Try convincing a group of 10 
programmers who have never written one and don't know anyone else 
who has. I have; I failed.

Atila

>
> And yet most of those companies use D in one project and it 
> stays in that one project. That means other developers do not 
> switch, management has no task to introduce it elsewhere and 
> the project is more or less supported by the developer that 
> pushed for the technology.