On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 02:20:52 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Andrei posted this on another thread. I felt it deserved its
own thread. It's very important.
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I go to conferences. Train and consult at large companies.
Dozens every year, cumulatively thousands of people. I talk
about D and ask people what it would take for them to use the
language. Invariably I hear a surprisingly small number of
reasons:
* The garbage collector eliminates probably 60% of potential
users right off.
* Tooling is immature and of poorer quality compared to the
competition.
* Safety has holes and bugs.
* Hiring people who know D is a problem.
* Documentation and tutorials are weak.
* There's no web services framework (by this time many folks
know of D, but of those a shockingly small fraction has even
heard of vibe.d). I have strongly argued with Sönke to bundle
vibe.d with dmd over one year ago, and also in this forum.
There wasn't enough interest.
* (On Windows) if it doesn't have a compelling Visual Studio
plugin, it doesn't exist.
* Let's wait for the "herd effect" (corporate support) to start.
* Not enough advantages over the competition to make up for the
weaknesses above.
(I'm work as a C/C++ programmer for military sector in the area
of the information and communication infrastructure and
electronic warfare)
When I told of D to my boss he had a couple of reasons why not to
use D for development of our products.
* Backward compatibility with existing code.
* D is much more complex than C++
* Not enough tutorials and solved problems in D on stack overflow
(LOL)
* We have problem to recruit a good C++ not a good D programmer.
(1/100 is good)
* My boss does not have free time to learn new things...
* Using GC is strictly prohibited in realtime apps. And D does
not have an compiler supported ARC
* D without GC or ARC is not powerful as it can be.
* More and more people are dumber, we must write our programs for
later re-usage by any junior what we must employ. C++ is in this
way much more easier than D, cuz you know what every line of your
program do. Employ C++ junior programmer and let him to learn D
and then work on our projects is not a good (and cost-effective)
idea.
* Not everyone is interested in programming, sometimes people are
doing it just for money.
