On Sunday, 28 January 2018 at 13:50:03 UTC, Michael wrote:
I do worry that, having been using D for about 3 1/2 years now,
that the perceptions of D outside of this community don't seem
to be changing much. It does seem to make a huge difference to
have a big company behind a language, purely for the "free
advertisement". Most people at my university, outside of the
computer science department, that are using languages like
Python and R and MATLAB the most, are very aware of Rust and
Go, but not D. I wonder if we do need to pay more attention to
attracting new users just to get people talking about it.
That's what you would expect, because D is a very ambitious
language, which means its natural user base is much more spread
out and less highly concentrated. And beyond that, most code is
enterprise code that's closed source, and whilst the web guys
talk a lot and influence the culture, enterprise guys talk much
less and just do their thing quietly. Even in our world, how
often do you see the people using D get involved in forum
discussions? Sociomantic, Weka, Ebay, and so on. (Or Microsoft
- did you know that D was used in their COM team? They didn't
exactly send out a press release...) A little bit, but only a
little in relation to their use of the language. If you're
trying to accomplish something in a representative enterprise
context with lean resources, you don't have much time to talk
about what you are doing.
If you want to draw people to the language (and, honestly, I
wonder why it matters so much to many here - it's clearly taking
hold, has momentum and will continue to grow for decades; an
acorn will become an oak tree, and fretting about how much it's
grown in the past year might be missing the point, so long as
it's healthy enough), why not just focus on both improving the
language itself (pull requests, documentation) and on
accomplishing something useful and worth doing with it?
Of course there are the usual trolls who don't seem to write much
D, but seem to be drawn like vampires to the energy of those who
do. Sad.
On Sunday, 28 January 2018 at 17:23:12 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
This has been mentioned multiple times, D really needs some
kind of killer application.
Why?
It's a generalist language for getting stuff done in an age where
people have succumbed so much to Stockholm Syndrome that they
think it's a positive thing in a language that you can only use
it to do something special. Yet trends in performance and
performance demands point to the rising importance of efficiency
(and I suspect there will be a return to the recognition of the
importance of being a generalist - in programming, as in other
fields). There was a tweet by the author of Musl libc observing
that software today runs slower than software twenty years ago,
and linking the bloat to the insane pressure to maximise CPU
performance over all else. The era of that kind of ruthless
optimization is over because it's not the only thing that
matters, and we start to see the price of it. And generalism -
in a dynamic business environment, there's considerable value to
have capabilities that aren't adapted to particular narrow skills
when what you need is always changing and may be unknown even to
you.
My generation was privileged because very quickly if you wanted
to get anything interesting done you had to learn assembly
language (maybe write your own assembler or disassembler), had to
learn a bit about hardware, and could never pretend the CPU was
this perfect platonic abstraction. And for a while that changed,
but I think the past is returning again, as it often does.
So I see a value in hiring hacker / generalist types who can
figure things out. For example:
https://hackaday.com/2017/01/26/a-personal-fight-against-the-modern-laptop/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzmm87oVQ6c
Back in 2007, most finance types would have said how completely
impracticable and unreasonable. But I say, with GK Chesterton,
that "all progress depends on the unreasonable man". And someone
like that doesn't succumb to helplessness once they are outside
of their shiny IDE, knows that in the end everything is just
code, and you can change it if you want to, and there is
strategic value from building organisational capabilities from
hiring such people. Usually I'm a couple of years ahead, and I
think others will follow. If you hold a contrarian point of
view, you know you're right when surprises start coming in your
direction, and people still can't see it. And I think that's
been the case since 2014.
Anyway - so D is a general purpose language, and I think we are
likely seeing a nascent return in recognizing the value of
generalist tools and people.
On my line of work having Go on the skills list is slowly
becoming a requirement, due to Docker and Kubernetes adoption
on cloud infrastructures.
That's great. Walter says that good code should look good on the
page, and Go code looks nice enough. It's got nice network and
infra libraries, as you say. But why would the adoption of Go be
bad for D? I think it's great for D because after a period of
stagnation it gets people open to newer languages, and on the
other hand the gap between the spirit of Go and D isn't that far
(GC, clean code, native target) even if they don't have generics.
It's a big world - both D and Go can succeed, and the success of
one isn't bought at the cost of the other.
Just wondering if mir or easier GPGPU programming could be that
killer application.
We sponsor mir algorithm (some of the routines within were
developed for us, and we were happy to open source them), and we
are rewriting our core analytics - used across the firm in a
$4.1bn hedge fund in D from C++ before that. What alternative
really exists for what we are doing there? And C++ vs D, it's
not even a fair fight if you care about productivity, plasticity
of the code, and generating wrappers for other languages that you
can still understand whilst maintaining decent performance. At
the same time, we're not a D shop - a diversity of languages is
not a bad thing, provided you have some way for them to work
together. Code reuse is very difficult, but the UNIX way does
work. On the other hand, if you want to connect components, how
are you to do that? Well, D is pretty nice for writing DSLs that
can connect to code written in other languages, and where
expressions can be evaluated from other languages.
A specialist language adapted to a particular domain or set of
domains - yes, that benefits from a killer app. But for a
generalist language that's useful for getting stuff done - why
would there be a single killer app? That doesn't make sense to
me. There should be multiple successes across different domains,
and that's what we are beginning to see. Just bear in mind that
the web and tech guys talk a lot, but most programmers don't work
in those industries. It would be a mistake to conflate salience
with economic importance, I think.
Laeeth.
