A friend of mine needed to complete a small project and thought of using
a language he didn't know for it. He already knew I work on D so he
considered it alongside Go. He ended up choosing the latter, and
documented his decision making process in a few notes that he
subsequently shared with me. I'll paste below a sort of transcript of
his handwritten notes.
I think this is valuable information from a relatively unbiased
potential user, and good ideas and action items on how we can improve
our curb appeal. Even mistaken perceptions are good signal - it means
our materials weren't explicit enough to dispel them.
====================
* Golang: simple!
+ very small language, very concise & simple
+ playground/tutorial
+ easy to start using it, no-nonsense
+ vast libraries
+ no inheritance
+ one binary to distribute
+ good for servers
+ feels like a better C (mostly)
- can't write generic code involving arrays/slices
- no good IDE
+ Google!
+ clear feeling it's here to stay
+ visible, many projects
+ enforced style (indentation, exports)
* Dlang: big!
# big language
# IDE?
# small subset?
# libraries?
# will it be around?
# Perception matters
## how stable is it?
## not great for servers or UIs; what then?
## new house in unpopulated neighborhood; there's an "Enter, it's open"
sign but sits emtpy; by comparison Go -> condo in hip, trendy area
* Ideas for D
# what C++ should be but cannot
## too late for C++, but not for D
## some or all of @safe, immutable, pure should be the default
# libraries, projects should be prominently listed and nurtured
# single-idea advantage; D seems to embody too many ideas at once
## concurrency?
## networking?
## generics?
## interoperability with C and C++?
## focus on one!
# must attract/hook casual users
# unclear what's a good IDE - JetBrains? is there Vim support?
# what's D's equivalent to frameworks such as react.js?
# language designers think of features, users think of purpose
## react, go, rust, java -> purpose
## D, C++ -> "Ivy league candidates" having a response for every
programming language design challenge there is, but less focused on
purpose (Andrei's note: I assume D more at fault than C++ on this)
General feeling: "I don't feel smart enough for D and am looking for a
quick way to accomplish a goal. I've read the Wikipedia article on D and
didn't understand a few things. The examples seem to show off the
language but that made them confusing. I wanted to get more into it, but
by that time Go had already won - I looked at the tutorials, changed the
sample code a bit right in the browser to see how it'd work for me, it
was easy, I was in already. Some of my comments therefore illustrate my
shortcomings than the language's, but that's true one way or another for
all programmers (that's why technical superiority of a language doesn't
guarantee its success)."
===============
I'd love us to derive a few action items from this and other feedback.
Andrei
