Top 3 use cases for D

[Chris Piker]

On Saturday, 19 October 2024 at 03:13:02 UTC, Lance Bachmeier 
wrote:
> Sure, D didn't distribute Tk like some scripting languages have 
> been doing for a long time, but it was very easy to use. It's 
> hard to imagine that being a dealbreaker. The programmers would 
> have still needed to get approval from their managers.

Since my perspective is limited to the environments I know, and 
I've never worked in industry, I wouldn't presume to claim any 
expertise in that arena.

However in academia, teams are often rather small and independent 
work is encouraged.  A single person can demonstrate something 
quite useful on their own volition. Since demonstrating something 
useful often involves a GUI, it's nice to have one come along for 
the ride.

Almost all rapid prototyping environments provide some GUI 
capability (ex: MATLAB) and I see engineers and students whipping 
up reasonable tools using them all the time.  D lends itself to 
rapid prototyping, but does not have a simple included GUI lib.  
While not a deal breaker, it's a hindrance.  Little bits of 
friction add up, and eventually the cart stops. Conversely, 
little bits of thrust also add up, and thinking back to my early 
days as a programmer, I happen to think this particular addition 
would have helped D take off.

Anyway, it's all academic at this point.  Right now some sort of 
javascript bindings may be far more important since browsers are 
everyone's favorite GUI environment, and javascript can be really 
slow for some operations.