On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 10:17:16 UTC, Wulfklaue wrote:
On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 09:35:56 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
With all due respect, on the contrary I think that promoting D
as a general purpose programming language could be its only
chance to really improve its popularity, and thus
significantly grow its current user base.
I'm sorry to repeat myself once again on this forum, but it's
obvious to me that D's strongest feature at the moment is that
it has the best syntax on the market.
I personally will not go that far. Syntax is more about
preference. Rust looks dog ugly to me and yet some people find
it beautiful.
Personally i find Swift / Kotlin a nicer looking syntax then D.
Reference types, strings, maps, slices, arrays, UFCS, etc,
everything is made so that the most obvious and readable code
will work both safely and efficiently.
There is absolutely zero syntactic noise, the code is crystal
clear.
So instead of losing many potential users by focusing on a
niche market (unhappy C++ programmers), D should focus on its
major strengths, which already now make it stand high above
its competition.
Agrees with that. The problem with a language trying to scope
away a specific group of developers, from a existing ecosystem
is that your fighting the entire ecosystem, not just the
language. That is a mistake that many new languages make.
Why switch over from C++ to D?
Language => Sure.
Tooling => No.
Libraries => No.
Editors => No.
...
That has been the dilemma that not only D has faced. Until you
get critical mass where people start writing a massive amount
of your ecosystem, its hard to get people to switch over.
For instance, all these programmer-friendly features make D
even more convenient for scripting than scripting languages
themselves.
True but the same can be said about Go. And Go is even more
friendly and has the ecosystem now. You want to write something
more exotic. There is big change that somebody wrote a
module/package in Go. That is not going on with D. Sure, you
can take a existing c library and transform it into D but it
still takes work and is not always 100% idiomatic D.
That is the main difference between D and lets say Kotlin.
Kotlin build on top of Java and you can native imports all the
libraries. There is less effort involved.
Maybe this was mentioned before but a lot of programmers prefer
to lazy program. They want to write there code, move forward
with there project and not spend time on trying to get "things"
to import/convert/work. D has more people who have no issue
doing things the "hard" way. I applaud that resolve, i really
do. But at the same time its a barrier, a attitude that makes
it hard to accept those lazy people like me :)
IMHO, trying to compete directly with C++, C# and Java, with
the current state of the language and of its ecosystem, is
simply choosing the hardest path to success...
See above. Some people prefer the hard way. The masochists
*haha*. I know the angle where your coming from Ecstatic but
its hard to convince people. Especially when there is a
manpower shortage.
Frankly, i think the best way to go about moving D to
popularity, is simply money. More fully time programmers but
that requires money.
I do not understand why D does not have a BountySource account
( salt.bountysource.com ).
Look at nim ( $1,896 last month ) /crystal ( $2,345 this month
):
They publish there fund raising. They motivate people by
pointing out the backers. Their income is a extra full time
developer ( who wants to work for cheap :) ). The whole D
foundation is nice and well but to me it feels like cloak and
daggers. It something hiding in the background, something
obscure. Maybe i am not expressing myself good again but D its
fund raising seems to be largely corporate focused but they
seem to lose a big market potential. Corporate funding is
harder to get then a lot of small donations.
Its just my two cents but if D wants to grow, it needs full
time developers. Not just volunteer work. People who can do the
grunt work that volunteers do not want to do ( because its just
not sexy ).
I agree with all that you said.
Just about Go, I must say that language is a bit rude, and
actually less convenient and versatile than D.
Many convenient features are missing (true reference classes,
member function polymorphism, generics, etc).
IMHO, Go is lagging somewhere between C and D.
Kotlin is a better contender, especially with is LLVM
implementation.
And with its current ecosystem, I'm sorry to say that indeed
Kotlin native is becoming de factor the best alternative to D.
