On 4/17/2011 2:37 PM, Gary Whatmore wrote:
In every young language community the first users have to make sacrifices and build the ecosystem. That's how it goes.
While I'm not endorsing the rude tone of the rest of this post, this is an extremely good point. According to Wikipedia, Python is about 8 years older than D. I imagine that 8 years ago people were saying the same things about Python that they say about D now. Back then, everyone was using Perl for Python's niche and probably (I wasn't a programmer back then) saying how Python's ecosystem is too immature, Perl is good enough despite its warts, there's so much existing code written in it, etc.
There will always be a tradeoff between using the latest and greatest language that the ecosystem hasn't caught up with yet and using an older language with tons of legacy baggage, bad-in-hindsight or outdated design decisions and great, mature tools and libraries. D is strongly in the former category. Java and C++ are in the latter. Python is somewhere in between. Ironically, unlike the real trolls we deal with, Gour seems to understand this. All he's saying is that D2 does not embody the tradeoff he wants to make right now.
