I think dicebot has hit a point there. It's true, much if not
most of OS software is a (hopefully) somewhat niced up version of
what was written to scratch a personal itch.
But I'm quite confident that this is not true for a project like
D. I mean, just to come up with a solid and well thought
description of the itch (like "C++ is a mess and a PITA") that
can serve as guiding line when conceiving a language is a major
undertaking. One possibly may come up with some script thingy
just to scratch an itch; to conceive, design and implement
something like D, however, was and is a very major undertaking,
1000s and 1000s of hours, aso.
Wouldn't one like then that others see, too, what one has
understood 10 years ago and tried to make better? Wouldn't one
then want to make it really easy to test drive the language, see
it's power (on cpus rather than web sites)?
My driver for complaining about D is *that it's so great* - but
quite low on the useability side. If D weren't that great I'd
simply have turned away.
I get Walter Brights point that he can't (and doesn't want to) be
in charge of everything and the kitchen sink. The debugger issue
though *does* concern dmd itself and not having a realiably
working debugger with full (usual) functionality *is* a major
show-stopper.
I mean, come on, how reasonable and consistent is it to leave the
C/C++ mess and to then spread debug writelns all over the place?!
For the rest, I agree, it might be hard to see for emacs/vim
crowd and the like. Yes, they are right, there is life without
nice colors and mousing around development.
Let us not forget: To be somehow useable for insiders is only a
first step. To really gain traction a second step must be taken:
To be reasonably well useable according to what is common today.
Which, I think, translates at least to: vim or emacs modes plus
some decent cross platform editor like Scite and a"thin IDE" like
geany. From there on it's a matter of taste and religion and -
that's an important point! - having a comfortable base useability
through the chain we can afford to say "You want X? Go and code
it. The tools needed are there.".
A+ -R
