About whether D / rust / golang can be popular.

[aberba]

On Thursday, 26 November 2020 at 05:46:59 UTC, zoujiaqing wrote:
> Whether a programming language can be popular depends on what?

>
> ## D
> Must kill skill: It looks good?
> Availability: standard library is poor. Bad IDE. GC efficiency 
> is low. Lack of friendly debugging tracking tools. Lack of 
> pprof and other practical tools. Although the language features 
> many but can not add popular practical features, such as await.
>

>
> ## Summary
> D language must improve usability if it is to become popular!

Its soo funny though 😂. D be like "Why you do me that?"


Personally I think D is great for most stuff... I can't 
personally point anything blocking my use case for D at its 
current state (not to say that things shouldn't be improved)... 
except embedded programming which is being worked on.


You can to look at the community from these three:


1. The C/C++/?? veterans. They know their stuff and tooling. They 
most likely use emacs or vim and are happy with pointing Cli 
tools like gdb at the binary to debug stuff. It so happens that 
most of the core contributors belong in this group. To them, work 
on the compiler, memory safety, nogc, technical correctness, deep 
metaprogramming wizardry, and related areas are more important. 
They're not the type to develop dub packages or ecosystem tools 
(motivation??)...and might not know how even if they want 
to...cus they don't use those tools. They're not the people to 
write D blog posts, articles, videos, or appear in podcasts, etc. 
They are not?? the community "cheer leaders". Remember, they're 
the core contributors and very short of manpower because D is a 
large language with many new ideas. One reason why they might be 
under staffed could be how its not easy to contribute to D due to 
the unpolished and undocumented process, workflow, project 
direction, etc. They're very technical but not enough time (or 
motivation) to do those soft tasks. If you read some of the 
phobos docs, you'll understand they're the folks doing the work.


2. Is the intermediate. They're the folks who can move between 1 
and attend to 3. They answer most of the technical questions cus 
they have come to know where to find what. My guess is there's 
not a lot of such people...or at least enough active in the 
community day by day. And they're probably working so their free 
time isn't enough to do more. They're the contributors of most 
packages on dub... bindings, ports, etc. They may not be core 
contributors but they contribute to the core language too. 
They're generalist. Not enough time means undocumented packages??

3. Is the rest... coming from JavaScript, Java, python, etc where 
the ecosystem is effortlessly polished... mostly. They're used to 
IDEs, packages, tutorials, videos, great docs (those that don't 
read like memory dump of implementation details), example 
projects,... that kind of stuff. They sometimes find it hard to 
settle with the absence certain tools or under-development or 
maybe unique position?? of D ecosystem like they're used to. 
They're hooked by how nice D code feels and can't accept why D 
isn't all hot and popular..HN, reddit and stuff. They may feel 
like D needs more marketing, promotion and stuff. Or that D needs 
needs x&y features which has made T lang popular. Popularity can 
mean more users (including engineers from other companies who 
might fund D or offer developer time), more contributors, more 
packages, improved docs, more tools, etc.


Of course its not a perfect categorization cus the community is 
more diverse than that. But that's some observations I've made. 
Also, there are so many people also using D quietly.