On Wednesday, 27 December 2017 at 18:13:41 UTC, Russel Winder
wrote:
The challenger has to offer something that the community value.
Rust offers memory safety over C. D offers "better C++". This
is the wrong message to achieve traction. D must offer
something that C++ does not offer.
If you're a better version of one of the market leaders, that's
good enough. If you were just a better Erlang, that'd be a
marketing problem!
But as of 2017-03-30 I have no hidden agenda, i.e. I retired.
:-) This mjeans I am just doing what I want, which currently is
organising ACCU conference, organising DevoxxUK conferences and
programming DVB-T and DAB clients. D has failed to get traction
at ACCU, has no chance at all at DevoxxUK, and has lost to Rust
in DVB-T and DAB applications.
So D is invisible in the places you frequent, but has anybody
written an entire storage system in Rust?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/22/a_dive_into_wekaios_parallel_file_system_tech/
My point is that D and Rust are both currently lower-traction
languages, so it's expected that you don't find them in many
places. Rust is certainly doing better right now, because it is
focused on the niche of memory safety, but that means Gerald
almost certainly isn't going to use it for his Gtk-based tiling
terminal emulator:
https://dlang.org/blog/2017/08/11/on-tilix-and-d-an-interview-with-gerald-nunn/
D and Rust are going after different markets, but D is trying to
stay more general-purpose, which Rust has abandoned so far
(though their upcoming GC may be a step towards more general use).
On Wednesday, 27 December 2017 at 18:41:41 UTC, Laeeth Isharc
wrote:
That's really the whole point about D. It's an era where
people start out assuming that using the right tool for the job
means that one tool can't do two different kinds of job well.
But, as Walter has said elsewhere I think, in some cases that's
because the tools people are used to using are limited, whereas
in fact there's no need for that - just use one tool that's
good at both.
It's going to be a struggle to recognise such a tool if you
start with the presumption it cannot exist.
This reminded me of a current theme in tech, the tension between
modularity and integration. Here's an example quote from a
couple months ago:
"But the long arc of history shows how hard it is to succeed in
vertical integration after you build on horizontal foundations.
Generations of managers graduated from the modular school of
thought, specializing rather than generalizing. Now they are
facing an integrated experiential world where progress depends on
wrapping the mind around very broad systems problems."
http://www.asymco.com/2017/10/04/orthogonal-pivots/
The canonical example is how Apple doesn't compete on
feature/spec checklists but on an integrated experience that just
works better. That may be tougher to market for tech users, but
it is increasingly what people want, even many programmers.
