On Monday, 28 September 2015 at 09:35:53 UTC, Chris wrote:
Yep. What I was talking about was not the fear of a commercial
failure because of having picked the wrong tool (management). I
was talking about my impression that D might intimidate
programmers/coders.
This logic is very difficult to follow. Software project
management is often done by people who are programmers. From a
project health point of view D2 suffers from the same issues as
C++, the language feature set makes it easy to create a mess, and
therefore the demands of investments in the development process
gets higher. This aspect is one significant reason for why
languages like Go and Java are getting traction.
But even after years of polish Go is still perceived as risky:
http://www.techworld.com/apps/why-googles-go-programming-language-could-rival-java-in-enterprise-3626140/
Geeks have no trouble picking up new languages, C++ programmers
most certainly will have no trouble picking up D. The semantics
are too close, but D2 does not solve C++'s issues, and brings
another set of issues that C++ does not have. This is not a fear
issue. It relates directly to qualitative issues.
Projecting "fear" onto professional decision making is just a way
to make excuses for D's shortcomings.
Commercial risk is not that big a factor (Java was adopted by
IBM very early), and there's always the option to interface to
C, should D lack anything.
Sun was a big player in IBM's core market and the Java design was
very orthodox. Risk is certainly the single most important factor
for avoiding change. If you change your core toolset you also
will have to change the process and infrastructure.
has to do it. If we all had the same timid attitude towards
adopting new technologies, D would no longer exist, nor would a
whole bunch of other technologies.
You are assuming that technologists have timid attitudes towards
playing with new technologies. That is not true. Most
technologists I know of find that fun. Adopting tech for your
personal use or for small tools is one thing, adopting it for
deployment is a completely different issue.
What tools can D successfully replace? Give a focused answer to
that and you can improve on D to a level where it becomes
attractive.
But keep it real. Fear among programmers is not D's main issue.
That's just an excuse.
