On Mon, 2014-08-18 at 23:12 +0000, Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote: > > Whilst the hardcore Pythonistas remain Pythonistas, some of the > > periphery has jumped ship to Go. Sadly D did not capture these > > folk, it perhaps should have done. It would be easy to blame > > fadism, but I think the actual reasons are far less superficial. > > So I gather that you agree that "what everyone is doing" may not > be the best in this case (python vs D) if there are no direct > network effects beyond libraries and getting help and you have > the freedom to determine your own platform choices?
Go arrived with high marketing as something new, which it is. It is a stripped down, strongly typed C with memory management, objects and extension methods, and (most importantly) goroutines as a lightweight built-in concurrency and parallelism framework based on thread pools. The language itself is very simple (apart from the consequences of semi-colon ellision/re-adding), and so captured the imagination of many. Not unreasonably. I really quite like Go. However it has some, for me, serious irritants, most especially an obsessive hatred of exceptions, enforcing return codes and error handling at the point of call – though it does support this in a neat way. One effect of the "fanboi" element of using go has been very rapid evolution of the eco-system, especially strong because of the package approach and the use of DVCS as a tool for accessing packages. D is not a new language so doesn't have the "new shiny toy" feature, but it remains an rapidly evolving language. It is definitely a better C++ but C++ is evolving fast enough that C++ folks stay with C++. So in a sense D has failed to capture the market it aimed for when it started. Also it is still playing "catch up" in the eco-system stakes. D does however have a very neat model of abstraction that allows for a very functional programming approach. It isn't functional programming per se, but it gets very declarative. C++ is a long way behind in this, but there is little C++ → D transfer. The problem for Python folks looking for a native code language is that D is a big language and Go is a small language. And then there is Rust… > > For me, NumPy has some serious problems despite being the > > accepted norm for computational work. > > If not too offtopic, do you have a link describing, or would you > briefly summarize these problems? I am intrigued. And what > would you suggest in its place? Fortran? > I'll start a separate thread for this one. […] > Would you consider D stable enough/suitable for general financial > market work with development initially by a small underresourced > team? Not ultra high frequency execution - at most legging in > and managing longer term positions. But I am more interested in > sentiment analysis, producing technical analysis indicators that > summarize market activity across many different securities, some > bond arb stuff. C++ just seems so ugly, and I feel uncomfortable > only having python in the toolbox. D seems so far to be quite > suitable... The most important thing about any project using a programming language is that the development team, testing team and deployment team all approve of the language being used. It sounds like you approve of D so go for it. The language is not totally stable, so expect incompatibilities on upgrade. I am not a fan of all this "backward compatibility" obsession that has gripped Fortran, C++ and Java (though I can see why it is necessary), but with D you will need to budget for upgrade-related refactoring. Personally I was happy to take that hit. -- Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 voip: sip:russel.win...@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: rus...@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK w: www.russel.org.uk skype: russel_winder -- Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 voip: sip:russel.win...@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: rus...@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK w: www.russel.org.uk skype: russel_winder
