On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 15:09:53 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
wrote:
On 09/23/2015 08:19 AM, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:
The most important can be paraphrased as "I had heard of D but
as it
was getting no traction, I never looked at it again."
While I agree this is something we need to address, I gotta
say: I *strongly* consider that attitude to be highly
indicative of a mediocre-at-best developer.
This is engineering, not fucking fashion. Popularity has no
place in decision making here. From everything I've seen, 90%
of the problems that exist in computing technology today can be
traced back directly to some jackass(es) weighing popularity
higher than actual technical merit.
While there is truth to this, it's also true that people's time
is valuable, and many programmers are not going to want to spend
time learning a language that they're not going to be able to use
in the long run. And even if it can be used in the long run, if
they're not going to be able to use it in a job, then maybe their
time is better spent learning a language which they _will_ be
able to use in their job - or even help them get a job if they
know it. That doesn't necessarily mean that such folks are
mediocre programmers. They simply have priorities and learning a
better language for the fun of it or simply for pet projects
doesn't necessarily fit with those priorities. The more that D
fits in with those priorities (e.g. the more jobs there are where
D actually gets used), the more that many programmers will be
interested in D.
Obviously, there's more to learning a programming language than
learning a tool that you're going to be using at work, or most of
us wouldn't be here, but not everyone is able to spend enough
free time on programming to learn new languages for the fun of
it, and many of those that could would rather spend their time
actually programming something than learning a new tool.
I completely agree that programmers should learn multiple
languages, and I would very much like to see technical merit win
over simple popularity, but popularity does have a significant
effect on which languages people use and which survive, and
there's a definite argument to be made that there's less value in
learning a language which isn't likely to be used much outside of
pet projects. The simple fact that language X has more traction
than language Y will generally help language X gain further
traction regardless of which is technically better. We certainly
hope though that the technical advantages of D will help it gain
further traction so that we don't have quite so much of a chicken
and egg problem there.
- Jonathan M Davis
