Why is D unpopular?

[bachmeier]

On Wednesday, 3 November 2021 at 17:36:19 UTC, harakim wrote:
> On Tuesday, 2 November 2021 at 17:35:08 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 2 November 2021 at 17:27:25 UTC, Dr Machine Code 
>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I think it's due to large ecosystem and the big corporations 
>>> with deep pockets that pushes them. But I'd like to know you 
>>> all opinions
>>
>> Yes, that's a big part of it. If you look at other languages 
>> that doesn't have the corporate backing, they are about as 
>> popular as D. Also, when something is developed in a proper 
>> organization, it also usually means some kind of functional 
>> management and a few developers that can do that full time.
>>
>> Python is kind of a outlier here, that has grown organically.
>
> I was thinking about this post for a while. What about R, Perl, 
> Ruby or PHP? I don't think even C++ had corporate backing out 
> of the gate. Which company backed Scala? Sun?
>
> It seems like Python is in good company and the 
> corporate-backed languages are the outliers.

[S was created at Bell 
Labs](https://web.archive.org/web/20181014111802/http://ect.bell-labs.com/sl/S/) shortly after the creation of C. R is an open source implementation of S that became extremely popular for university teaching. Students in many fields, not just statistics, use it in multiple courses before graduation. And unlike other applications, someone analyzing data has a lot of freedom in choosing their language, so adoption didn't require convincing someone in a suit.