On Friday, 13 March 2015 at 14:34:23 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
On Fri, 2015-03-13 at 14:20 +0000, Chris via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
[…]
reluctant to learn something new. Crowd 2. we can win over,
yet we have failed to communicate with them, to reach out to
them. Most people I know have a look at D's homepage and say
"Uh! Hm. Ah, I'll use Python." No, they are not hardcore
programmers, they are engineers and scientists. But they are
_users_, people who need to write software to analyze data, to
create something. We should not ignore them, even if they are
not (initially) interested in templates and metaprogramming.
Neither was I, when I first learned D.
It is not Python or R or Julia the language that people choose,
it is
the superstructure built on top. So for Python, it is Pandas,
Matplotlib, SciPy, NumPy. And the ability to use ready made C,
C++ and
Fortran libraries.
Ecosystems play a big role in language choice.
In our case, C++ has for a long time been pushed for plumbing at
the OS level or that last performance that the JIT cannot help.
So any C++ replacement has to be able to be exposed as JNI,
P/Invoke, COM, WinRT, V8.
As well as offer similar level of mixed debugging across
boundaries.
