C's Biggest Mistake on Hacker News

[RhyS]

On Monday, 23 July 2018 at 22:45:15 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> I've predicted before that what will kill C is managers and 
> customers requiring memory safety because unsafeness costs them 
> millions. The "just hire better programmers" will never work.

I have yet to see a company Walter where higher ups will take 
correct actions to resolve issues.

Customers do not understand **** about programming. Your lucky if 
most clients can even get a proper specification formulated for 
what they want. If clients are that knowledgeable we do not need 
to constantly deal with issues where clients had things in their 
heads different then what they told / envisioned.

And most manager are not going to rock the boat and stick their 
necks out. Not when they can simply blame issues on programmer 
incompetence or "it has always been like that with programming 
languages". I have yet to see managers really taking 
responsibility beyond guiding the projects so they do not get 
fired and hope to rack in bonuses. Issues can always be blamed on 
the tools or programmers.

Sorry but that response is so naive Walter that it surprises me. 
Its like wanting a unicorn.

And frankly, good luck convincing any company to convert millions 
of C code into D code. Not when manager hear about some new 
language or framework or whatever that is the chizz. They rather 
keep running the old code and move to something new. D is not 
something new, its not the chizz, its the same issue that D has 
struggle with for years.

Its the same reason why that topic derailed so fast. You want to 
see something fun. Mention PHP on HackerNews/Reddit and you see 
the exact same trolling. People rather push their new favorite 
language, be it Go, Rust, ... then pick D.

Response at my work when i made some stuff in D... "Why did you 
not use Go". Because the managers knew Go from the hype. They 
know Google is behind it. And some of our colleagues in sister 
companies already used Go. And that is all it takes.

I am sorry to say but to succeed as a language beyond being a 
small or hobby language it takes: Being established already or 
having a big name to hype behind your "product". Anything beyond 
that will have topic derail and frankly, its more negative then 
positive.

And D has too much old baggage. Its the same reason why PHP 
despite being a good language ( for what it is ), still keeps 
getting the exact same crude on forums.

If i am honest, DasBetterC is a for me unreliable D product 
because using specific D library function can be GC. Or 
DasBetterC needs to be sold as C only, ever, forget about 
everything else that is D ( library, packages, ... ). Until 
everything is 100% GC free, your going to run into this. And even 
when its 100% GC free, people have long memories.

Its always a struggle swimming up a river.