On Sunday, 2 September 2018 at 12:07:17 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
That's why the people that adopt D will inordinately be
principals not agents in the beginning. They will either be
residual claimants on earnings or will have acquired the
authority to make decisions without persuading a committee that
makes decisions on the grounds of social factors.
If D becomes another C++ ? C++ was ugly from the beginning (in
my personal subjective assessment) whereas D was designed by
people with good taste.
That's why it appeals inordinately to people with good taste.
[snip]
Be that as it may, however, you forget the fact that people "with
good taste" who have (had) an intrinsic motivation to learn D are
also very critical people who take no bs, else they wouldn't have
ended up using D in the first place. Since they've already
learned a lot of concepts etc. with D over the years, it's
technically easy for them to move on to either an easier language
or one that offers more or less the same features as D. So once
they're no longer happy with the way things are, they can dive
into a any language fast enough for the cost of transition to be
low.
One has to be practical too. Programming involves more than just
features and concepts. Good, out of the box system integration
(e.g. Android, iOS) is important too and he who ignores this
simple truth will have to pay a high price. That's why developers
of new languages are so keen on giving users a smooth experience
when it comes to app development and cross compilation which
leads me to the next point: IDEs.
No. You don't need an IDE to develop in D. However, an IDE can a)
make coding comfortable and b) boost your productivity. As to a):
maybe you just grow tired of the text editor & cli approach and
you just want to click a few buttons to fix imports or correct
typos and be done with it, and as to b): all this helps to boost
your productivity, especially when you can easily set up an app
or a web service with a few mouse clicks. In D, if you want to do
something with ARM/Android you will invariably end up with a
potpourri of build scripts and spaghetti lines full of compiler
flags etc. Not smooth, it takes a lot of time to set it up
manually and it's not easily maintainable. Doable, yes, but just
because something is doable doesn't mean it's recommendable nor
that people will actually bother with doing it. I'm under the
impression that the D Foundation doesn't pay much attention to
these things once they are kind of "doable" and somebody has
volunteered to "look into it" with no guarantee whatsoever if and
when it will be available to users. And if there are complaints,
hey, it is not "official" ask the guy who's looking into it. Not
very professional. See, that doesn't really give you confidence
in D and it gives you an uneasy feeling. Nothing worse in
software development than to be programming thinking "Am I
actually wasting my time here?", and of course, you become
reluctant to start anything new in D - which is only natural.
