On Friday, 19 May 2017 at 14:18:33 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
Well, for languages like Java, C, and C++, it's mostly a result of folks using those languages and being unhappy with them (which is then often why they end up using D - it addresses a number of their complaints about thos languages).
I'm a (mostly) C++ programmer as my day job and I'm well aware of its shortcomings. Still I like parts of it and I tend to get offended by comments that make me feel like some stick-in-the-mud idiot who still uses C++. Often it's just the tone. And while those comments are probably not as frequent as I suggested, they still exist and they are not opposed, so this is what sticks.
Another thing to keep in mind about language bashing though, is that the D community tends to do a lot of bashing about D. Much as we love D, there's a lot of complaining about various aspects that aren't perfect (I think in part because mant came to D hoping for their perfect language, and seeing it get really close to where you want but not quite there can be quite frustrating). So, it's not like the D community is constantly bashing other languages, claiming that D is perfect. We tend to bash any aspect of any language that we don't like - D included.
There's a big difference between criticizing a language (or anything else, that is) in its own community vs in another community.
People tend to get defensive in the latter case.
I haven't usually seen complaints about other languages getting new features. The only thing along those lines that I've seen much of is some folks getting annoyed because C++ added a feature that D had had for quite a while, and the D community almost never gets credit for ite Now, sometimes, those ideas really were arrived at separately, but some are so uniquely D that the odds of them having not been inspired by D are _very_ low. So, there's sometimes resentment over that. But if anything, the fact that that's happening just goes to show that D has some cool stuff that other languages might want too. Regardless, I don't recall anyone complaining simply because another language was improved in some way.
Maybe it's just me hearing things, but often those comments seem to imply that it's worthless to add the feature to C++, because it already exists in D and they haven't even done it right in C++. But as a C++ programmer I welcome every feature that helps me to write better code, I don't care where it comes from. I don't have the choice to switch to another language.
A _lot_ of D's featues have been inspired by other languages (e.g. slicing dynamic arrays and nested functions both exist in D, because Walter saw them in other langauges and liked them), and there have been plenty of occasions where another language's feature has been discussed for inclusion in D (e.g. a cleaner lambda syntax was added to D based on C#'s syntax, and User Defined Attributes were added, because folks had seen them in other languages and wanted them in D). In some respects, D is the poster child language of learning from other langauges, because so much of what we have was inspired by other languages or is explicitly an improvement over something that another langauge did (e.g. there are a lot of things in D that are there to learn from and improve on C, C++, Java, and C#).
I honestly don't know the history of D and programming languages in general enough to judge that, but I strikes me as odd that the main language designers know so little about their (assumed) main competitor. I imagine that if I would design a language, I would probably try to understand every existing language and take the best out of each. Especially if another language gets a lot of attention, like Rust currently, I'd probably want to know why and not just blame it to hype or corporate backing.
