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

[Chris]

On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 22:04:36 UTC, Laeeth Isharc 
wrote:
> On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 11:14:54 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 04:07:32 UTC, Laeeth Isharc 
>> wrote:
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>> By the way, you keep mentioning that you use D for your own 
>> internal stuff, and as far as I can see a lot of companies 
>> that use D do the same. They have their own in-house 
>> ecosystem, and that's fine. Of course, for this kind of usage 
>> D might be OK (apart from the facepalm flaws it still has) - 
>> or any language for that matter.
>>
>> However, a lot of IT companies (small, medium and big) also 
>> have to adapt to the market in terms of third party products 
>> like Android and iOS and other technologies (including those 
>> that do not yet exist). Once that's the case, D is one of the 
>> worst choices possible.
>
> D doesn't have the best GUI libraries, that's quite true.  JNI 
> is not that bad so if you wanted everything but the front end 
> in D would it be so tough?  You might be right about the 
> situation on ios as I haven't heard of people doing much there 
> in D - last I heard the hard work was done but the last stage - 
> something relating to bitcode if I recall right.
>
>> Everything takes years
>
> True.  Why does it bother you? Did somebody suggest it would be 
> otherwise? If one puts some energy behind making something 
> happen it's not that bad, I think.  Eg autowrap for JNI 
> shouldn't take more than a couple of months of work to be 
> mostly useful I think.
>
>> anything that is not directly related to (some specific 
>> features of) the language is treated as lowest priority
>
> Who is treating, and what is this word priority I keep hearing.
>
> It's open source, ordered anarchy.  It's hard enough persuading 
> a creative person that you pay to do something he doesn't want 
> to do.  How do you suppose it is that Walter and Andrei can 
> assign priorities more to your liking and make people work on 
> what you would wish?   They cannot.

It's not what _I_ wish. It's common sense. Sound string handling 
and tooling.

> I think you're applying rules from your work domain to an 
> environment where they don't apply.   That's simply not how 
> volunteer open source works.

This is no longer true of D. 18+ years and a D Foundation. The 
"hobby project / open source community" argument is no longer 
valid. You cannot aspire to be a big player on the one hand and 
then, on the other hand, when it gets a bit rough, say "Ah, we're 
just a small community". It's either or.

If I were an investor I'd say "No!" after listening to you. You 
need to be realistic. While everything has a spiritual dimension, 
one has to be practical at too.