It is the year 2020: why should I use / learn D?

[Aurélien Plazzotta]

On Friday, 16 November 2018 at 07:20:25 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>>
> Starting again from scratch may or may not be a good idea, but 
> it won't exactly help with maturity or for many adoption.  "I 
> think I will wait till D3 is ready".

Maybe, a tool like python 2to3 would facilitate the transition 
from D2 to D3?
Or perhaps a D2 branch maintained for a limited amount of time 
like a year. In general, the longer the migration phase is, the 
less likely an actual migration effort would occur.


> I don't know but any fixing of past mistakes seems to me a much 
> smaller change than D1 to D2 and so I don't know if it is the 
> ideal framing.  It's more like D 2.1 although then the 
> versioning of releases gets a bit confusing.
>

I think the currently failed semantic versioning is going to find 
a simple fix when D 2.100.0 will be released eventually, where 
the leading "0" character won't matter anymore.

>> The creators and the main contributors of D are all C++ 
>> full-time developers

>>  some of them even members of C++ commities.
>
> Traitors!  We must hunt them down and expel them!  
> Seriously,how can this be a bad thing?  Some people are even 
> members of non-native code communities also!  Why wouldn't we 
> want to have the benefit of the idea interchange that results ?

Please, don't turn me into a parody :/ I don't see them as 
traitors of course, I know they put a lot of effort into the D 
language and it's a wonderful thing for our community to have 
several semi-gods among us.
But my point is, I'm persuaded they believe much more in C++ than 
they believe in a future for D; the latter being rather a 
technological demo for something they would have hope at the 
beginning of their career.

>> For example, Walter distribute and commercialize a C++ compiler
> That's his old gig and he keeps something going I guess, but it 
> doesn't look to me like he is putting much time into DMC.  When 
> is the Cpp 2017 version coming out?  My guess is never.
>
>  > And Andrei contribute to C++ meeting in order to
>> identify and improve the weaknesses of C++...
>
> And they often don't listen and mess it up when they do, just 
> like with static if.  How is this a bad thing?  If C++ gets 
> better,I really don't think it's bad for D.

I am not sure it is a good thing either. At best, the original 
idea from D concept is pointed out in the C++ changelog but that 
provide not visibility or credit at all for D design, or D market 
in extenso.

>
>> D cannot grow and develop its own identity if the main focus 
>> is C/C++ compatibility.
>
> Do you really think that's the case that it's the main focus?

I admit I have exagerated, there are lot of efforts committed 
towards PRs managing, DIPs processing, DMD optimization, newCTFE 
and probably more. But Andrei told us about 18 months ago he had 
a female student under scholarship from the D foundation who was 
working on D3 and we have no news since the teasing.
So, I would like to know whether this kind of project will happen 
:)


>> Make no mistake, nobody will abandon his job in C++ among the 
>> D community to persuade a employer to hire him for a D 
>> full-time job
>
> :)
>
> There are no jobs in D :)
>
> I'm pretty sure you are mistaken both on the supply and demand 
> side.

I don't understand, what do you imply?

> And we are still hiring.

Nice but for which tech?
To be honest, 2 years ago, I was hoping D would be ready to work 
with full-time, but to the best of my knowledge, there are no D 
jobs in France and it's a great frustration.

>> I wish I haven't hurt anyone's feelings but D project lack a 
>> bit of long-term vision.
>
> I think right now the vision is clear enough as far as it needs 
> to be articulated and the biggest constraint is that the D 
> Foundation hasn't been in existence for long and it's quite a 
> lot of work to create something from nothing and it takes time 
> from beginning to start to see results though if one pays 
> attention I don't think it's hard to see plenty of results 
> already.
>
> Everything is an S curve - very flat in the beginning.

Agreed, but the beginning was in 2001 for D you know... :x It's 
not like it was previous year.
Anyway, thanks for your input Laeeth Isharc :)