On Friday, 14 July 2017 at 08:57:17 UTC, Wulfklaue wrote:
https://blog.sourced.tech/post/language_migrations/
A recent article where github programming languages popularity
and migration got analysed was very interesting but it showed
one noticeable thing:
A total lack of D even mentioned!!!
When looking at other language ranking sites, D always scores
better then Rust. Yet, Rust gets included in the ranking but D
is ... nowhere to be seen. It gets even a bit annoying when its
always Rust, Rust, Rust ... that keeps popping up. Seen it more
and more how Rust is simply trampling over any D messaging.
D... It really has no very unique feature that makes it
noticeable.
* No Galactic overlord ( C#, Go, ... )
* no GC language that people can push until people there ears
bleed ( Rust)
* no really unique features that people care about to set it
aside from C/C++, ...
* It has the kitchen and sink but nobody talk about the kitchen
and sink.
I know people will jump onboard and start yelling how D has
very unique features but from the "outside world" its always
the same response. While more people are downloading D and
trying it out, i barely see any independent D language blogs.
Not to be a downer but D really in my eyes is missing that
"unique" feature that people care about, that allows people to
blog about the language...
I agree with the others that having no major company behind DLang
is not helping from a money/resource/exposure point of view.
That said, there must be things we can do as a community to help
improve the situation.
I can imagine for example that the community could focus on
particular sectors where D excels, and create as much quality
content as possible about how to use D to solve problems in those
areas. Moreover having a push to get articles into the
blogosphere and social media would do wonders.
Coming from a web development background (PHP), I think D is a
wonderful language. It's expressive, elegant, performant and
fun. Based on my experience, I think web development is one of
those sectors where D could become more popular.
Expanding on web development using D, I must say that Vibe.d is a
pleasure to work with and once the new release of Vibe.d is fully
optimised, it should stack up favourably over using a PHP
framework in terms of performance, memory consumption and
scalability. However if you're not a D programmer and you're
looking at the vibe.d website for the first time, you'd probably
leave for a few reasons without trying it. To address that I
would recommend the following:
- Vibe.d has built in Redis and Mongo drivers which is excellent,
but it may not be immediately obvious that you can in-fact work
with MySQL and Postgres easily. This is very important to many
developers, and hence having a clear nav/menu item that links to
a tutorial or two on the vibe.d website about integrating with
those databases would be very useful to put that objection to bed.
- Once it's appropriate, do some benchmarks that compares D to
PHP frameworks such as Slim, Silex, Lumen for common
functionality such as CRUD operations with sessions, JSON
serialisation etc, linking to the D code for reference. Assuming
D is easily the winner, really highlight the results. Ultimately
handling more requests on a single machine means money saved once
web apps start scaling.
- Have some tutorials about using JS frameworks such as
React/Angular/Vue.js and CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap and
Foundation with Vibe.d. Obviously these really aren't directly
related to D or Vibe.d, it helps to show that D can be used
easily for solutions using those technologies.
- Improving the vibe.d website look and feel, and having some
clear and bold messaging on the home page about why you should
use it.
Cheers.
