Should I invest time in D?

[atzensepp]

On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:
> After years of procrastination, I at the end of last year 
> finalized Rey Valesa's great dlang/vibe tutorial   
> https://forum.dlang.org/thread/gnluupbilugncznkffuo@forum.dlang.org.
> I had planned to proceed with a deep dive into D.
>
> With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has 
> opened.
> I do not want to be a part of such community and the future of 
> D does not look good. The alternatives do not look good either. 
> Immature, boring, too restrictive etc. Is assembler the choice 
> if you want to add a low level language to your Intel toolbox?
> I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  I 
> have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 
> 'Why should I use D?'. I am greatful for any polite answer:)

For me the decision to invest into a language is 70% pragmatism 
and 30% fun.
I came across D language for a project to  validate and 
manipulate large csv files.
The goal is to check integrity of the content and "transpatch" 
data from several other files into it. The prototype was written 
in python and it works but execution is slow. My second choiche 
was to use Ocaml beacuse I like functional programming. However 
since performance was sub terrestrial I started to implement in 
plain C. The code was blazing fast but I had lots of "fun" with 
the dynamic memory management. (e.g. strange things when realloc 
of internalized data ) Then I came to D and decided to continue 
with it for several reasons:
1. coding experience was very similar to python and C.
2. Language does memory management. No need for malloc, realloc
3. very fast execution time of the code
4. platform independence (Windows and Linux)
5. Native Code w/o Virtual machine (you can distribute an EXE)
6. getting setup very fast: without  installing tons of tools and 
libraries
7. support of functional programming

So for my problem D is a very good choice. I have no problem that 
popularity of D is not so high as for other languages as long as 
it helps me  to get my work done.