Why is D unpopular?

[Ali Çehreli]

On 4/30/22 15:17, Araq wrote:

 > Huh? The paper is quite good IMHO.

You have a lower bar to "papers" than I do.

The paper sounds scientific but is riddled with unscientific claims like 
"its adoption would be a disaster for the language", "This will make 
programs harder to read, understand, maintain, and
debug".

I quote: "blah blah blah". That might look good on certain type of paper 
but not on a scientific-sounding opinion piece like that.

The paper is written without a single piece of experience wits static 
if. They say "Any use of those declarations would also need to be 
checked by more static if statements." Poppycock! (Now, that's scientific!)

I have difficulty reading that paper because the authors do not have a 
single bit of self-doubt.

Their (I quote) "silly" code that mixes the preprocessor and static if 
is useless. Just because they could come up with ridiculous programming 
constructs does not constitute a counter argument to anything.

And watch this: "We have already heard suggestions of static_for and 
static_while. Can static_switch be far behind?" So what? What is the 
point in that? Is that an argument? Do the authors refute static if just 
because they ask that question with a smirk? I refuse it as an argument 
from grown ups. (The authors are from a university!)

No, re-reading the paper now (but I skipped the last parts because the 
first parts are more than enough for me), my opinion is the same: A bad 
paper.

 > The tooling problems that result from
 > `static if` are real.

Oh! I must have missed their point.

Ali