On Mon, 21 Jan 2013 02:00:12 +0100 "Rob T" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sunday, 20 January 2013 at 09:52:42 UTC, SaltySugar wrote: > > Why it isn't popular? We must popularize it. There aren't any > > tutorials with D, books and other stuff. How about writing a D > > programming forum? > > I don't think the problem is purely a technical one as some may > be suggesting. For example, even if all the technical issues were > resolved, I doubt usage will increase much faster than they > currently are. It won't hurt to make things 100% production > ready, but I doubt that's the biggest hurdle to overcome. > > With mountains of investment in existing C/C++ infrastructure, > who is going to make the leap to D? The cost of switching must be > far less than the cost of not switching. > D does continue to face an uphill battle for mindshare: These days, most people who write code prefer to use languages that accept ANY grammatically-correct code and deliberately remain silent about all mechanically-checkable problems they can possibly ignore. Apparently this is because they prefer to manually write extra unittests so that only a subset of these errors are actually guaranteed to get caught (if there's any guarantee at all). I'm not joking: I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if the next popular "advancement" in computer languages involves a way for compilers to stay silent about all grammatical errors as well as the semantic errors they already ignore *by design*. As bizarre and tongue-in-cheek as all that sounds, most programmers these days actually *DO* consider that to be vastly superior. (The thought that large numbers programmers can be that stupid is something I genuinely find disturbing.) If I were a savvy businessman (read: no ethical fiber), I would manufacture a line of fire alarms advertised as being 100% silent, and therefore less bothersome and less inconvenient than the "old" kind, and sell them exclusively to programmers. As long as I remember to refer to the non-silent alarms as "old", and point out how convenient and productive it is to not be bothered by pesky fire-alarm sirens, I'd be guaranteed to make millions off of these short-sighted suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hprogrammers. (I just threw up a little in my mouth at calling them "programmers", but well, *technically* that's what they...sort of...are.) A roundabout way to say it, but I guess the point I started out trying to make is this: The popularity of dynamic/interpreted/sandboxed/etc languages *is* IMO one of the more significant roadblocks in the way of D popularity. Silent fire alarms are what's hip, and here we are peddling an old-fashioned sounds-and-lights fire alarm. We're pragmatic instead of cool.
