On Saturday, 14 March 2015 at 09:00:11 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
If D is to compete in the financial computing arena where Python and R currently rule, there needs to be all the libraries for doing time series analysis, and rendering them graphically. There also needs to be a workflow that fits the users of the domain. The market leader is currently Jupyter (*) in the finance places I have connection with.
D can gain popularity by doing what Rcpp has done, by making it easy to embed C++ code inside R. Rcpp is currently the most common dependency among all R packages. I have done the same with D though it's not yet in a form that others can really use it (https://bitbucket.org/bachmeil/dmdinline).
The best thing to happen to D was the ability to create shared libraries on Linux. You can add D to your existing codebase incrementally. That is, in my opinion, D's "killer application". And D has an advantage over C++. R users will write C++ because they have to, whereas D is a language they'll use because they want to.
