D is dead (was: Dicebot on leaving D: It is anarchy driven development in all its glory.)

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 11:32:42 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Sunday, 2 September 2018 at 12:07:17 UTC, Laeeth Isharc 
> wrote:
>
>>
>> That's why the people that adopt D will inordinately be 
>> principals not agents in the beginning. They will either be 
>> residual claimants on earnings or will have acquired the 
>> authority to make decisions without persuading a committee 
>> that makes decisions on the grounds of social factors.
>>
>> If D becomes another C++ ?  C++ was ugly from the beginning 
>> (in my personal subjective assessment) whereas D was designed 
>> by people with good taste.
>>
>> That's why it appeals inordinately to people with good taste.
>>
> [snip]
>
> Be that as it may, however, you forget the fact that people 
> "with good taste" who have (had) an intrinsic motivation to 
> learn D are also very critical people who take no bs, else they 
> wouldn't have ended up using D in the first place. Since 
> they've already learned a lot of concepts etc. with D over the 
> years,

> it's technically easy for them to move on to either an easier 
> language or one that offers more or less the same features as D.

I don't think so.  If we are talking about the set of technically 
very capable people with an aesthetic sense then I don't think 
easier or feature set in a less beautiful way is appealing.

This is based on revealed preference, because the conversations I 
have with technically very capable people that know many other 
languages as well or better than D go like "what compensation are 
you expecting?  X.  But if it's to write D, I can be flexible" 
and so on.

Template meta-programming in D is quite simple.  C++ has many of 
the features that D has.  Therefore it's easy to do template 
meta-programming in C++, and just as easy for others to read your 
code in C++ as D?  I don't think so.  Having learnt the concepts 
in D and that it can be beautiful and easy kind of ruins you for 
inferior approaches.

BTW I was grumbling about some C# wrapper code written manually.  
It talks to a C style API (connected to an internal C++ code base 
developed before I became involved).  So you have a low level C# 
side declaration of the C function that returns an exception 
string by argument.  Then you have a C# declaration of a wrapper 
function that throws an exception if the exception string is not 
empty.  Then you have a layer on top that puts the class back 
together.  Then you have a high level wrapper layer.  Then you 
have the bit that talks to Excel.

I thought surely there must be decent code generation 
possibilities in C#.  It's not too bad as a language.  I looked 
it up.  Microsoft say use HTML templates.  Well, okay... but I'm 
not sure I like the trade-off of having to do stuff like that 
versus having to deal with some pain at the command-line now and 
then.

> So once they're no longer happy with the way things are, they 
> can dive into a any language fast enough for the cost of 
> transition to be low.

You're making an implicit empirical statement that I don't 
believe to be accurate based on my experience.  I would say if a 
representative programmer from the D community decides the costs 
no longer offset the benefits then sure they can learn another 
language because the representative programmer here is pretty 
talented.  But so what?