On Thursday, 1 October 2015 at 16:00:29 UTC, Chris wrote:
I agree that the D community raises the bar quite high for itself and other people might get the impression that everything is perfect, while it isn't. However, a lot of complaints are about IDEs, one click installers (i.e. the tools) and not about how D handles floating point numbers.
Well, I am less concerned about those that stumble on the doorstep. If that is enough to not carry on then they are most likely not motivated and can probably get their needs covered elsewhere. I am more concerned about those that use D for what it is particularly well suited for (systems and OS-level programming) and give up after writing some tools with it.
Could you line out how you would like a language to be so it doesn't bore you stiff?
Consistency in philosophy is important. If D is a compile time oriented library authors language (and I think it is) then that needs to come to the forefront so that library authors easily can write beautiful code and easily integrate D code with other environments. The runtime dependencies must be kept low and the focus on powerful and easy to use compile time resolution and static analysis has to be strengthened.
There is a lot of competition in this domain right now with C++17, Rust and some 3rd party things going on in the Go sphere on one side and Pony, Nim, Loci, Crystal and quite a few others upcoming projects. In addition a plethora of scientific languages and toolkits are appearing on the horizon thanks to commoditised JIT/backends. Even Haskell seems to be gaining a little bit of ground, doesn't Facebook use Haskell for spam detection or something?
With so many emerging languages it is important to stay true to ones strengths and not overfocus on application domains that most likely will be taken over by domain oriented high level programming languages in a ten year time frame.
