How programmers transition between languages

[John Gabriele]

On Tuesday, 30 January 2018 at 09:20:37 UTC, aberba wrote:
> On Sunday, 28 January 2018 at 18:54:34 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>> On Sunday, 28 January 2018 at 13:50:03 UTC, Michael wrote:
>
> Enterprises care about making money with whatever will help 
> them do that (impress investors). Its developers who care about 
> languages that help them write code that suites their 
> requirements. The focus should be on developers not companies. 
> People using D cannot be represented by Microsoft,
>  Sociomantic,  Weka,  etc. employees. Its of no use chasing 
> after companies... make it useful and everyone else will come.
>
>> If you want to draw people to the language (and, honestly, I 
>> wonder why it matters so much to many here
>
> Its a simple math well understood since long ago.  The larger 
> the army/workforce the better. Things get done. Walter always 
> say here "Its left with someone to do the work". There other 
> stuff he doesn't address including those outside language 
> internals.
>
>>- it's clearly
>> taking hold, has momentum and will continue to grow for 
>> decades; an acorn will become an oak tree, and fretting about 
>> how much it's grown in the past year might be missing the 
>> point, so long as it's healthy enough), why not just focus on 
>> both improving the language itself (pull requests, 
>> documentation)
>
> Someone needs to do that and we're short of people willing,  
> have the time and able to do that.
>
> Either someone is paid to care enough to do that (Like Google 
> do with Go, Oracle with Java,  Jetbrains with Kotlin,  etc.) OR 
> grow a community/workforce to collectively make that happen.
>
>> and on accomplishing something useful and worth doing with it?
>
> There's also a possibility the acorn will loose interest and 
> momentum and... die. Your opinion on what is worth doing is 
> based on your domain or interest.

I get the impression that a wave is coming (or is already here) 
where people more and more are looking for modern 
natively-compiled statically-typed languages --- leaving 
Python/Perl/Ruby/PHP/JS --- not only for performance, but for 
easier development for larger projects.

The languages I see benefiting primarily from this wave are D, 
Rust, Go, and Kotlin/Native.

Of those, my impression is that Rust and Kotlin are perceived as 
the most modern. Go and Rust have some hype, but Go's hype seems 
to have already peaked. D appears well-positioned (good 
community, high-level with GC, has dub and <code.dlang.org>, docs 
and books are available).

If there are areas of D that need to be modernized, streamlined, 
or simplified, but which will break backcompat, now may be a 
excellent time to consider beginning those changes/deprecations.