How do you use D?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Wednesday, 3 January 2018 at 12:15:13 UTC, Pjotr Prins wrote:
> they come if they need it. I remember a Google engineer telling 
> me that he was tired of people bringing up D every time. That 
> was 10 years ago. D has had every chance to become a hype ;)

There was a lot of hype around D about 10 years ago,  because of 
slashdot?  (slashdot doesn't seem to work as a hub in that way 
anymore?) Geeky people had even heard about it in job interviews… 
But the compiler was a bit too buggy for production use and the 
GC was… a problem for what it was position itself as: a 
replacement for C++.

There are other languages that also position themselves as C++ 
replacements, such as http://loci-lang.org/  , but very few have 
heard of those. So yeah D has enjoyed more hype than most 
languages in this domain, actually.

> why. What is it that makes a hyped language?

Well, depends on the hype, I guess.  But you probably need some 
kind of "prophetic" message that will "remove all pain". Since 
C++98 was not painless, there was a market for a "prophetic 
message". Much less so now. Also you need a "tower for 
announcing" like Slashdot. I don't think reddit is anywhere near 
as effective as Slashdot used to be. Too fragmented.

Rust received hype because it would make writing fast programs 
"painless", just wait, it isn't quite ready yet, but we'll get 
there. So they hype prophecies were there before Rust was 
actually useful.

I don't think Go was all that hyped up. It received a lot of 
attention at first release, but was underwhelming in terms of 
features. But it received a lot of attention when being used for 
containers, I believe. So more a niche utility marketing effect 
in terms of buzz.

So hype seems to come with a language being used for some new way 
of doing something (even though the language might not be 
significant in that regard, e.g. Go). Or the hype seems to come 
before the product is actually useful, not quite like a pyramid 
scheme, but close… Oh yeah, bitcoin too. Prophetic, but not 
particularly useful… yet, but just wait and see.

So I guess hype comes from:

1. People having an emotional desire to be free from something.

2. A tech delivering some kind of prophetic message one can 
imagine will provide some kind of catharsis if one just believe 
in the outcome.

Then you have this all the psychological effect that if people 
have invested significant time, resources and/or emotion into 
something then they will defend it and refuse to see flaws even 
when faced with massive evidence against it. So the hype will be 
sustained by a vocal set of believers if you have reached  a 
large enough audience with your messaging before the product is 
launched…?

Then it tapers off in a long tail… or the believers will make it 
work somehow, at least good enough to not be a lot worse than the 
alternatives.

> docs. I just disagree with the aim of trying to make D a hyped 
> language.

Yes, that is a bit late, I think. You would have to launch D3 or 
something to get a hype effect (at least in the west).

> A language like GNU Guile has only a few developers - and they 
> do great work.

But is Guile used much outside GNU affiliated projects?