On Friday, 11 September 2015 at 12:30:42 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
Here is another source for external D evaluations I missed,
January 2015:
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/01/20/2026221/is-d-an-underrated-programming-language
I find the viewpoints of the student who wrote 18000 lines of D
code interesting.
It is interesting. However, criticism of D often revolves around
issues that every language has (or will have sooner or later -
see you later Rust!;)). Yet people are willing to put up with the
deficiencies of other languages, because they are told to by a
committee, because it's "official", because it's the way it is.
If not implementing breaking changes is an issue in D, why do
people put up with C++'s backward compatibility then? Not to
mention the fact that every few years there's a new C++
programming style that renders old code obsolete (in other words
"What you've written so far is all crap!").
If D implemented breaking changes on a regular basis, the
criticism would go along the lines of "One cannot use it, because
the code breaks all the time, stay away from it until it's
stable!". I've heard it all before.
A lot of it has to do with expectations. The user is
disappointed, but what did s/he expect in the first place? A good
example are book reviews on amazon. Some people say a book is
crap, because there were words they didn't understand, some
people hate a book, because they expected something like Tolkien,
but the language was not "noble" enough for their liking. Does
that mean the book is actually bad?
At least this particular reviewer of D actually used it and he or
she does have points to take home and work on. However, I can't
help but think that it's only from D that people expect miracles.
