On Fri, 2014-07-11 at 16:54 +0000, Chris via Digitalmars-d wrote: […] > I remember Java used to be "theeee" best thing ever. After years > of using it, however, I found out how restricted the language was > / is. Still, it's been a success, because people believed all the > propaganda. What matters to me is not so much the odd fancy > feature, it's how well the language performs in general purpose > programming. Go was designed for servers and thus will always > have one up on D or any other language at that matter. But could > I use Go for what I have used D? Not so sure about that. Also, > like Java Go is a closed thing. D isn't. Once I read about D that > it shows what can be done "once you take a language out of the > hands of a committee". Go, like Java, will finally end up in a > cul de sac and will have a hard time trying to get out of it. Not > because the language is inherently bad, because it's in the hand > of a committee. Ideology kills a language. But it doesn't matter, > because people will use Go or whatever anyway, will _have_ to use > it.
People believed the FORTRAN propaganda, the COBOL propaganda, the Pascal propaganda. I think we ought to distinguish good marketing from hype. Java had good marketing, was in the right place at the right time, and had a huge amount of hype as well. If Go is better for server things than D then might as well stop trying to use D at all. Go was actually designed as a better C with CSP for concurrency and parallelism. Go, D, Rust, C++, C, Haskell,… are all just programming languages that create native code executable. Thus they are all in the same category regarding potential usage. Everything else is about whether the programmer likes and uses well, the language. If Go and Java are closed languages, so is D. All three have open source repositories and people can submit changes via pull requests. All three have committees comprising the people who have commit rights to the mainline and they are the only people who can actually change the language. I think I have to repeat the point about irony here regarding ideology :-) > What I'm taking issue with is that everybody focuses on the flaws > of D (every language has flaws), which often gives the impression > that it's an unfinished, stay-away business. It's not. D can be > used, and I've used it, for production code. It's more mature > than D or Rust and it is superior to other languages like Java > (no OO-ideology for example). Mind you, D is a hindsight > language, which makes it wiser. Does it have flaws? Yes. I come > across them sometimes. Is there a language without flaws? If > there is, tell me about it. Talking about hindsight, I've tried > many different languages, I like D because of what it has to > offer for general purpose programming, it compiles natively, > interfaces with C at no cost at all, it has strong modelling > power, features that users require are added. I may sound like a > zealot (see "irony"), but I'm not. I'm very pragmatic, D is a > good tool and, being community driven, there is a real chance of > making it a fantastic tool. Individual features are not > everything. Go folk have exactly the same view and argument regarding Go. Java folk have exactly the same view and argument regarding Java – well except for the compiles to native code bit, obviously. ;-) In the end it is about community rather than the programming language per se. Java created a huge community that was evangelical. Go has rapidly created an active community that is evangelical. Python has rapidly created a large evangelical community. D has slowly created a small community that hasn't as yet created the outward looking evangelical aspect. Where are the user groups having local meetings is my main metric. Java definitely, Go definitely, C++ sort of, D no. This is the real problem for D I feel. Without local user groups meeting up you don't get exposure and you don't get traction in the market. If there were more D users in the London area than one in London and one in Brighton maybe we could start a London D User Group (LonDUG). SkillsMatter would host. -- Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 voip: sip:[email protected] 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: [email protected] London SW11 1EN, UK w: www.russel.org.uk skype: russel_winder
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