On Sunday, 6 August 2017 at 06:49:45 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
For instance, D is my favorite language, and I try to promote
it as much as I can (reddit, stackoverflow, even on the go-nuts
google groups).
But professionally I still use C++ (#3 TIOBE), PHP (#7), Go
(#16) and now Dart (#20).
Not D.
Despite Go and Dart are very recent "post-D" languages, people
are already starting to use them a lot these days. Whether you
trust or not these "pseudo" rankings, they are probably already
more popular than D, despite they are still in their 1.x
version.
That's sad, because the same developers who now use Go
(including me) could have started to use D instead. But they
didn't.
Obviously Google's great support and marketing help a lot, but
most developers are not as dumb as you may think.
You have to look at the big picture. Let's ignore for a moment
what might improve D's adoption and perception. Let's also ignore
this particular moment in time. Let's go back to the beginning
and look at the big picture from then until now. From that
perspective, it's quite a rosy picture. We've got a wealth of
libraries available compared to just a few years ago.
Conversations on reddit don't immediately descend into D-bashing
like they used to. I see more new people more frequently in the
forums than I used to. Multiple companies are using D and talking
about their usage, sharing their code, where there used to be
none. It's just a vastly different community than it was when I
first stumbled into it. Much for the better.
Yes, there are holes to fill, improvements to be made, but there
always have been and there always will be. It's an ongoing
process that, by the way, has many more people contributing to it
than it did a decade ago. It's natural for people to come in
along the way, look at the current state of affairs (without the
benefit of that longer perspective -- or even those who do have
perspective but have lost heart because their major peeves
haven't been addressed), and start despairing that if only D did
this or did that, or targeted that domain, or had a plugin for
that IDE, or whatever, then it would be a better choice than Rust
or Go or Javascript and more developers would pick it up. That
might even be true. But the thing to remember is that neither the
language nor the community has stagnated. Progress is going
steadily forward despite all the predictions of doom and gloom
(which I've been seeing in these forums since 2003). And if
everyone in the community would pick a pet peeve to fix, whether
it be making edits to the web site or contributing to an IDE
plugin, it all moves that much further forward. As long as we
keep our heads down and keep chipping away, things will only
continue to improve.
