On Friday, 17 July 2015 at 12:06:08 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Friday, 17 July 2015 at 11:23:28 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
An attractive platform is which gets the job done, not the
best one, which doesn't actually exist (if it existed, there
wouldn't be a list of options). And it's not like D has
nothing to show, one must consider requirements for his task
to decide which tool to choose and there's no single answer
that suits everyone.
There is always a relatively small set of best solutions for a
given problem. One needs to find a rational and obvious answer
to the question:
For what domain is D the best choice?
You are switching the question without recognizing this - some
kind of fallacy of composition. There may be only a few sensible
choices in a given hedge fund team at a particular time and
location. There aren't only a few sensible choices for hedge
fund data processing generally. It's a big world, and there are
many more variations between the needs of different teams than it
is possible to imagine.
The work of Austrian economists on entrepreneurship demonstrate
that it simply is not possible to know which people will use a
product and how. The future is unknown, if not unimaginable.
Who would have imagined a couple of East German PhDs would have
had such success building a company based on D in a domain that
didn't quite exist in that form at the time they began,
particularly given all the complaints about the garbage
collector. (The fact that they built their own has no bearing on
my point).
So it's a spurious question, and would be spurious even if D were
a product that were sold by a corporation like a manufactured
product, rather than what it is, which is an organically
developing language and ecosystem that is heavily influenced by
its originators yet not controlled by them.
The bigger picture is not D in a death match with any
identifiable languages. As Peter Thiel says, thinking of
yourself as competing is an extremely destructive mindset for
operating in business. One wants to carve out a monopoly that is
earned by doing some set of things uniquely reasonably well.
Aesthetics matter for programming languages, since programming is
for the time being a human activity, and so there doesn't even
need to be a technical superiority (although I think there is).
The context for all of this is the economics shifting in the
longer-term towards native code. If you presume programmer
productivity is the only thing that matters and treat efficiency
like a free resource, it's a dead cert that at some point
efficiency will no longer be free. I think we are probably at
that point, and that Facebook's experience with tradeoffs is not
an edge case, but a leading edge for what more people will
experience in future.
Furthermore, just rhetorically, gentle and constructive
suggestions for improvement that come from within are likely to
be more effective than those that seem to some not to grant D its
due even when it's difficult to argue from any perspective that
there's an area it has gotten right. I do not think I am the
only one with this sense.
Just a single, well argued answer that stands up to scrutiny.
Without it, few people will feel like endorsing it. (loss of
marketing effect)
Opinions are like noses. Everyone has one. Not everyone has
earned the right to speak with authority on every topic. You
make an empirical statement about what will happen if things are
not done your way. I personally doubt your empirical statement
because it doesn't align with how things are done in my small
(and in aggregate not so small) patch of the world, and these
things must compose for what you say to be true. Nobody cares
about whether in theory D is good for an industry; they care
about whether it solves the particular problems at hand (human,
cultural, and tacit knowledge questions being an unavoidable
component of what defines the problem set). I am not the only
one in my sector to think that it does, so if I cared about
social proof - which I do not - I'd feel comfortable enough with
the decision.
