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

[Chris]

On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 04:07:32 UTC, Laeeth Isharc 
wrote:

[snip]

So I see, for you D is some sort of an esoteric group therapy.

> What did you personally do to make things less parochial and 
> more consistent?

Yawn. Same strategy again: "Contribute or shut up!". Groundhog 
Day.

> It's pretty easy to make an impact.

It's actually not. Not in D.

> But to my eyes it's reminiscent of the behaviour of a spoilt 
> child to insist others do
> things unless they are also doing what they can given their 
> situation to help.

Again, condescension. Using a posh word ("reminiscent") and 
asking a cowardly question at the end ("Are you?") to make it 
look as if it were not a personal attack! Jesus! To be honest, 
I've used D for years and promoted it among people I know. I've 
written loads of software in D that is being used by others. I 
think that could also be seen as a contribution. And if I mention 
/ request certain things that are common in other languages or I 
see that certain things are being neglected, of course, I am _the 
ungrateful child_ or I don't understand how the universe works or 
both.

My sarcasm is a reaction to the fact that I (and others) usually 
get no reaction regarding the points we make, only derision, 
nitpicking and a sermon about the general philosophy of D and 
that only the high priests really understand it.

> You seem to be assuming the D Foundation has not just a 
> gazillion dollars but a big staff to
> go with it.  This isn't the case, I think.  It wasn't set up 
> long ago and it's just beginning to start to get going.  It's 
> awfully hard creating something from nothing (and it takes ages 
> before you see results since it's an S curve) though of course 
> its easy to give helpful advice.

The thing is that - as you mentioned yourself - there's loads of 
stuff out there already: Dpp, DStep, Joakims ARM stuff, 
Polyglot.h etc. Is it so unreasonable to expect the D Foundation 
to focus on collecting all the brilliant work that's been done by 
volunteers so far (fair play to them!) and package it as a nice 
product that can be extended as needed? That'd be a killer 
package and a good selling point for D. It's only common sense.

The D Foundation initially gave me hope that something like that 
would happen, and then you could get medium to big players on 
board (what's a million dollars to IBM or the like?) However, it 
got worse than before. While the development of D used to be a 
bit chaotic it has now become an autocratic chaos. The focus has 
shifted from improving D as a language (including tooling, 
packaging etc) to obsessing over the pet feature of the day. It's 
more of a hobby project now than ever before. And mind you, the D 
Foundation is young, but D is 18+ years old.

But hey, that's all right, if that's what the D leadership wants, 
fine. But stop pretending that D is a useful language people 
should use in the real world.