On Saturday, 12 July 2014 at 10:27:12 UTC, Russel Winder via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
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.
But D is much more open to discussion and features are
implemented faster, as far as I see. If I think about Java, that
it took them ages to implement useful features like enumerations.
Go ruled out templates, if I remember correctly. It's this kind
of ideological / dictatorial attitude I don't like. Of course,
Walter has the veto of death, it's his child after all. But there
is far more flexibility. In the D community people listen to each
other and trust each other's judgements and user experiences (or
we wisely shut up, if they have no expertise on a certain topic).
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.
[snip]
You are right of course, but that was not my point at all. My
point was that we have to stop the constant D-bashing. One flaw
(or perceived flaw) is blown out of proportion and used to
discard the language as useless, which it is not. What H.S. Teoh
described is true, you can start with script like stuff in D and
it scales later. I've been doing the same thing for a while now.
I no longer use Python or the like, I just use D, and if it's
just for a regex filter.
There are three things involved here, one is that people opposed
to D are willing to put up with whatever flaws in other
languages, but have no mercy when they detect a flaw in D, which
leads us to point two: I suppose people don't "trust" D, because
it has no big company behind it (so it cannot be good, it's not
"authoritative", in other words D doesn't wear suit an tie).
Third, we don't emphasize the good things about D enough (see H.
S. Teoh's list). I can imagine that people are (ironically
enough!) put off by D, because they think it is too difficult,
too nerdy (cf. templates, ranges). It's true, it takes time to
grasp some of D's more advanced features. But D can be used in a
simple way for simple things (cf. script like programs). If
someone is thinking about writing a program that does some number
crunching in C (say for signal processing), why not use D instead
of C or Python (God forbid!)? It can later be extended or
improved. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to use D, it
offers the same ease of use as Python. I think people are
sometimes a bit scared to leave the comfort and security of the
well-trodden path that languages like Python and Java seem to
offer.
I think we need to address these issues, because they are of a
psychological nature and not really language issues. I'm sure
that if we fixed GC and had the best implementation ever, people
would find something else to complain about "D doesn't have blah,
I don't like it!"
That's basically what my post was all about.
