bearophile wrote:
Walter Bright:
D aims to reduce project costs by reducing training time and
shortening development time.<
I agree that this is very important. Helping the programmer avoid
bugs and helping her to follow good design practices are among the
most important qualities of a programming language, because in
practical programming often most time (= money) is spent debugging
programs and updating them.
But you are comparing D with C++, because programming in D1 is faster
and often simpler than doing the same in C++.
But today most people use languages like Java, Python, C#, that often
shorten developing time even more than D1. D1 is almost a system
language, so it's not easy to compete with the productivity of
application languages designed to put the programmer first and the
CPU second.
I've tried to program in Java. It takes me considerably more time to get
things done in it. That time is lost writing much more code because it
is a less expressive language.
The other problem those "CPU second" languages have is that people often
use them in a hybrid manner - Python for the logic, with C++ to speed up
the slow parts. Doing that is a sign of desperation, as neither language
is fulfilling the needs of the programmer.
And D2 is not an easy&simple language, you need a good amount of time
to learn/teach it, more than Java for example.
Being a simple language does not imply being a productive language.
Heck, 6800 assembly is very simple (about 40 instructions), but it takes
a lot of work to get simple programs correctly coded.
Pascal is another language that can be mastered in a few hours, yet is
very unproductive because it's hard to get anything done in it.
