On Thursday, 23 July 2015 at 16:46:01 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
Dicebot:
D has done many things wrong, but there is one right thing that
totally outshines it all - it is cost-effective and
pragmatical tool for a very wide scope of applications.
would you care to write more on this as a blog post, making it
vivid and setting out some examples? that's my tentative
judgement too, and why I am here, but I lean very heavily on my
intuition and that's not enough to persuade other people when I
don't yet have mastery of the relevant domain knowledge, having
returned to programming quite recently. I am talking to
another decent-sized hf that might be open to exploring the use
of D, but the more vivid people are able to make the case the
better.
AFAIR Don had quite a good summary at DConf 2013
(http://dconf.org/2013/talks/clugston.html) for how it applies to
our business. I guess that presentation can still be used as
selling point.
I like to put it this way : only very few of Sociomantic
developers knew at least something about D before joining the
company. It were mostly C++/Java/Whatever developers which
learned everything on spot. We haven't even had any special
training courses - just giving one book (Learn Tango with D) and
few weeks of time to experiment was usually enough to start
righting some production code, learning more advanced stuff later
on per-need basis from reviewer comments.
Considering growing deficit of skilled programmers in the
industry in general being able to kickstart into new language
like that is a very big deal for business. C style syntax brings
familiarity and being able to write working apps with simple
concepts only (even if they are un-idiomatic in "modern D")
greatly improves learning curve.
No matter how many effort is put into tooling or documentation, I
simply can't see Rust ever being used like that. Well, unless it
gets studied commonly as part of computer science BSc and most
new devs will be at least faimilar with it. Writing simple number
guessing app (like one presented in Rust book) can easily take
half an hour for even experienced (but new to Rust) developer -
it simply won't compile until you get every single smallest bit
_right_. In small to medium business you simply can't afford
investments like that.
I see Rust as possible language of choice for a very small (but
important) subset of applications of big enough size that
maintenance costs are much greater than development costs AND
both performance and safety matter. AAA games, life-critical
real-time software, software monsters like your next Firefox or
Photoshop. That is big enough share of market in terms of money
for language to keep being demanded but it is tiny minority of
applications in terms of pure project count. It is clearly not
your average next project.
