Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Friday, 25 January 2019 at 11:07:48 UTC, Jacob Shtokolov wrote: This is where the precise GC might play a better role, BTW. Misspelling: not precise, conservative GC of course.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Friday, 25 January 2019 at 10:15:15 UTC, Martin Tschierschke wrote: ( On my wish list at the top: An official D database connector. (MySql/MariaDB, Postgres, SQlite, MonetDB..) ) What about trying to find and to fund a maintainer for this purpose? (Next funding goal Mike Parker?) I think it requires an official API specification like DB-API in Python. Being a general-purpose programming language, D introduces some fragmentation inside its community. For example, some people don't want to use the GC, but some people do. So the API probably need to take such points into consideration. And I could say the same for HTTP-related standards. Take a look at what PHP has: https://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-7/ https://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-18/ Regarding the killer feature: I have a strong feeling that D would perfectly fit the web application development scenario. The HTTP protocol is stateless by its nature, so it's theoretically possible to use a region-based allocation strategy for HTTP request handling. This is where the precise GC might play a better role, BTW. Also, D has much closer syntax to JavaScript, which means this may help to decrease frustration switching between different backend and frontend languages when you develop a web app (if I'm correct, this problem is solved only in Clojure/ClojureScript today). In addition, I guess that it's totally possible to write a TypeScript-like transpiler for D, which can help to bring type safety to the frontend.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Thursday, 24 January 2019 at 23:02:07 UTC, Ben wrote: On Thursday, 24 January 2019 at 14:44:07 UTC, bachmeier wrote: Of course, one could argue that it must have offered enough to keep some of them interested. They were able to get stuff done when they used it. The build in and good performing http server hit the sweet spot. Never underestimate the desire of people to simply get going fast. As a developer, you can be assured that your Go HTTP server will survive a upgrade to a new major release version. That assurance is a bit less with D. ;) One of D its weak spots, that its so general positioned as a C++ replacement, that it lacks a identify for itself. Yes! The following idea was written by several posters: Keep std. small, but offer a special label "recommended by D Foundation" for some more packages available via code.dlang (DUB) This would mean, that some of them, currently under individual control are moved to the official D Foundation Git repository. So those could be kept up to date, to ensure no breakage when the language evolves. ( On my wish list at the top: An official D database connector. (MySql/MariaDB, Postgres, SQlite, MonetDB..) ) What about trying to find and to fund a maintainer for this purpose? (Next funding goal Mike Parker?)
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Thursday, 24 January 2019 at 14:44:07 UTC, bachmeier wrote: Of course, one could argue that it must have offered enough to keep some of them interested. They were able to get stuff done when they used it. The build in and good performing http server hit the sweet spot. Never underestimate the desire of people to simply get going fast. As a developer, you can be assured that your Go HTTP server will survive a upgrade to a new major release version. That assurance is a bit less with D. ;) One of D its weak spots, that its so general positioned as a C++ replacement, that it lacks a identify for itself.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Wednesday, 23 January 2019 at 18:42:06 UTC, bauss wrote: Go is garbage and it's only popular because Google is behind it. It has absolutely nothing to do with the language itself. I don't know if I'd agree that it's garbage - it has a lot of appeal to certain types of programmers, though not to me - but I do agree that it's popular (to whatever extent it is) because of Google. I remember when the language was first announced, there were a lot of people excited by the prospect that GOOGLE IS CREATING A LANGUAGE. IT HAS TO BE AWESOME. These were not people who tried the language and found it to be better than the alternatives. They were people who hadn't even seen it. That was back in the days when Microsoft was the devil and Google were the good guys. Of course, one could argue that it must have offered enough to keep some of them interested. They were able to get stuff done when they used it.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Wednesday, 23 January 2019 at 12:26:02 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote: On 24/01/2019 1:20 AM, JN wrote: Well, the truth is, people don't come to a language because of a killer feature. Sometimes it's even the opposite. Java and Dart are familiar to some extent because of lack of killer features. Actually that isn't quite true. Java's killer feature is consistent simplicity. That is how it was originally sold to great success. The ecosystem and tooling came later. Java is going to get CSP-style concurency as in Go probably in JDK13. It's called Project Loom. Here is a presentation by Mark Reinhold (Java project lead at Oracle) where he is presenting a preview of JDK13 and Project Loom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4125=nKJbDYRsO0s (starting at 1:08:47) This will create some competition for Go what the multi-threading model is concerned. Java is better than Go otherwise in every aspect except memory consumption.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Wednesday, 23 January 2019 at 16:47:04 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote: On Wed, 23 Jan 2019 14:37:30 +, Bienlein wrote: This is all true, but you need to keep in mind that Go had no real package manager for a long time. There was the "go get" command which loaded the code from some github repo in the state it was at the time when being loaded. There was no version control. Nobody really cared (the vendor stuff in Go was added with Go 1.10 or 1.11). Goroutines were the killer feature of the language that paved the way, because this was badly needed for writing server-side software. Go has several killer features: * It's got a GC and yet is endorsed by one of the major people behind C. This helps people get over their fear of garbage collection and into appreciating the benefits. * It's also got "pointers". They're actually references with pointer-ish syntax, but that makes people coming from C/C++ more comfortable. * It's not Java, and it's not slower than Java. * There was a team in Google that would rewrite old, crufty C++ code in Go. Was Go a benefit? Maybe in some ways, but the major benefit was a rewrite that the owning team didn't have to do. That earned goodwill among thousands of developers attached to Go as a language. * It's backed by Google (in large part because of that goodwill). I don't think fibers are all that important for Go's success. Maybe for people who would have looked at node.js but didn't want to use javascript? Go is garbage and it's only popular because Google is behind it. It has absolutely nothing to do with the language itself.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Wed, 23 Jan 2019 14:37:30 +, Bienlein wrote: > This is all true, but you need to keep in mind that Go had no real > package manager for a long time. There was the "go get" command which > loaded the code from some github repo in the state it was at the time > when being loaded. There was no version control. Nobody really cared > (the vendor stuff in Go was added with Go 1.10 or 1.11). Goroutines were > the killer feature of the language that paved the way, because this was > badly needed for writing server-side software. Go has several killer features: * It's got a GC and yet is endorsed by one of the major people behind C. This helps people get over their fear of garbage collection and into appreciating the benefits. * It's also got "pointers". They're actually references with pointer-ish syntax, but that makes people coming from C/C++ more comfortable. * It's not Java, and it's not slower than Java. * There was a team in Google that would rewrite old, crufty C++ code in Go. Was Go a benefit? Maybe in some ways, but the major benefit was a rewrite that the owning team didn't have to do. That earned goodwill among thousands of developers attached to Go as a language. * It's backed by Google (in large part because of that goodwill). I don't think fibers are all that important for Go's success. Maybe for people who would have looked at node.js but didn't want to use javascript?
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Wednesday, 23 January 2019 at 15:04:00 UTC, jmh530 wrote: I would think that dynamic class loading is something that could be bolted on to C++ (and presumably D as well), albeit awkwardly. Dynamic class loading means there is no more link step.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Wednesday, 23 January 2019 at 13:03:18 UTC, Bienlein wrote: Also, the Internet was Java's killer application. No other language had the libraries for accessing the Internet easily. Then there is dynamic class loading. This made things a little bit more unsafe at runtime but in general developer productivity rose sharply, comparable to Smalltalk and by order of magnitude compared to C++. At that time the competition for Java was only Smalltalk and C++. Performance was nevertheless good, because of runtime code optimization (HotSpot), which was a new thing (albeit taken from Strongtalk, some Smalltalk high performance variant) I would think that dynamic class loading is something that could be bolted on to C++ (and presumably D as well), albeit awkwardly.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Wednesday, 23 January 2019 at 14:14:06 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
I've made this comparison many times before, but I'll do it
again...
Look at what Rust offers as documentation for Cargo:
https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/index.html
This is what you get with Dub:
https://dub.pm/getting_started
One is professional documentation, the other was something
hacked together by a sixth grader over the weekend. The Dub
documentation is good through the part demonstrating `dub
init`, then it falls apart. It talks about two configuration
file formats - not one, but two ("use whichever you prefer")
and I have no idea there is even a discussion of configuration
file formats at that point. Then there's a link to this word
dump https://dub.pm/package-format-json.html.
Noticeably absent: how I'm supposed to *use* Dub. Where do I
put my source files? How do I add dependencies? Have you ever
heard of an example?
Then a little below that is a link to this page:
https://dub.pm/publish.html. I wonder what that is for. Can't
make heads or tails out of that.
This is *introduction to the language*. If someone sees that
and doesn't run away, there's something wrong. I most
definitely would have gone with Rust if it had been usable when
I started using D. The Dub documentation makes it really hard
to bring in users - and makes Rust look like a sane language in
comparison.
This is all true, but you need to keep in mind that Go had no
real package manager for a long time. There was the "go get"
command which loaded the code from some github repo in the state
it was at the time when being loaded. There was no version
control. Nobody really cared (the vendor stuff in Go was added
with Go 1.10 or 1.11). Goroutines were the killer feature of the
language that paved the way, because this was badly needed for
writing server-side software.
I don't think D will have some killer app in the mid-term future.
So what is left is to put a killer feature into the language like
CSP or safe manual memory management or something.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Wednesday, 23 January 2019 at 12:26:02 UTC, rikki cattermole
wrote:
Also as an FYI, Rust has had significant marketing effort put
into it. Consider its home page, it tells a story to get you
into developing code fast. D's doesn't. It is much better and I
think it might be time to have a complete rethink of D's
because the last redesign wasn't all that different to what it
was prior.
I've made this comparison many times before, but I'll do it
again...
Look at what Rust offers as documentation for Cargo:
https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/index.html
This is what you get with Dub:
https://dub.pm/getting_started
One is professional documentation, the other was something hacked
together by a sixth grader over the weekend. The Dub
documentation is good through the part demonstrating `dub init`,
then it falls apart. It talks about two configuration file
formats - not one, but two ("use whichever you prefer") and I
have no idea there is even a discussion of configuration file
formats at that point. Then there's a link to this word dump
https://dub.pm/package-format-json.html.
Noticeably absent: how I'm supposed to *use* Dub. Where do I put
my source files? How do I add dependencies? Have you ever heard
of an example?
Then a little below that is a link to this page:
https://dub.pm/publish.html. I wonder what that is for. Can't
make heads or tails out of that.
This is *introduction to the language*. If someone sees that and
doesn't run away, there's something wrong. I most definitely
would have gone with Rust if it had been usable when I started
using D. The Dub documentation makes it really hard to bring in
users - and makes Rust look like a sane language in comparison.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Wednesday, 23 January 2019 at 12:26:02 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote: Java's killer feature is consistent simplicity. That is how it was originally sold to great success. The ecosystem and tooling came later. Also, the Internet was Java's killer application. No other language had the libraries for accessing the Internet easily. Then there is dynamic class loading. This made things a little bit more unsafe at runtime but in general developer productivity rose sharply, comparable to Smalltalk and by order of magnitude compared to C++. At that time the competition for Java was only Smalltalk and C++. Performance was nevertheless good, because of runtime code optimization (HotSpot), which was a new thing (albeit taken from Strongtalk, some Smalltalk high performance variant)
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On 24/01/2019 1:20 AM, JN wrote: Well, the truth is, people don't come to a language because of a killer feature. Sometimes it's even the opposite. Java and Dart are familiar to some extent because of lack of killer features. Actually that isn't quite true. Java's killer feature is consistent simplicity. That is how it was originally sold to great success. The ecosystem and tooling came later. Also as an FYI, Rust has had significant marketing effort put into it. Consider its home page, it tells a story to get you into developing code fast. D's doesn't. It is much better and I think it might be time to have a complete rethink of D's because the last redesign wasn't all that different to what it was prior.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Wednesday, 23 January 2019 at 11:42:24 UTC, Bienlein wrote: On Wednesday, 23 January 2019 at 09:58:05 UTC, Sebastiaan Koppe wrote: On Wednesday, 23 January 2019 at 09:14:18 UTC, Bienlein wrote: On Friday, 18 January 2019 at 08:55:23 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote: D really needs its killer use case if it is to move away from that list. D is a lot like Scala on the JVM: Both language have myriads of language features and bells and whistles, but there is no killer feature in the language itself. For me the killer feature is meta-programming. No other language comes close. It's a nice feature, but won't make any startup company choose D or any other company as the language for their next software product. Well, the truth is, people don't come to a language because of a killer feature. Sometimes it's even the opposite. Java and Dart are familiar to some extent because of lack of killer features. But what they might lack in "expressiveness", they make up for with amazing ecosystem and IDE support (which is usually inversely proportional to language expressiveness). I can't think of any language that is popular just because of language features. Python? Not really, it has a great standard library, a broad ecosystem of libraries for networking, science etc. Rust? Not really. While their memory management features are cool, many people flock to Rust because of its rapidly growing ecosystem and a good strategy/project scope management.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Wednesday, 23 January 2019 at 09:14:18 UTC, Bienlein wrote: On Friday, 18 January 2019 at 08:55:23 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote: D really needs its killer use case if it is to move away from that list. D is a lot like Scala on the JVM: Both language have myriads of language features and bells and whistles, but there is no killer feature in the language itself. For me the killer feature is meta-programming. No other language comes close. Take the wasm-reader [1] library I recently wrote for instance. While not feature complete - nor a fair direct comparison - it is far less code than anything in C++ [2] or Rust [3]. [1] https://github.com/skoppe/wasm-reader/blob/master/source/wasm_reader/reader.d [2] https://github.com/WebAssembly/binaryen/blob/master/src/wasm/wasm-binary.cpp [3] https://github.com/rustwasm/twiggy/blob/master/parser/wasm_parse/mod.rs
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Friday, 18 January 2019 at 10:23:03 UTC, JN wrote: On Friday, 18 January 2019 at 08:55:23 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote: Apparently Google is ramping up the use of Rust in Fuchsia and hiring quite a few devs. Azure IoT Edge uses a mix of C# and Rust. Rust has lately got a lot of attention from game developers. Several game studios announced they are switching from C++ to Rust. Wait until they realise they're going to have to debug their game running at 1FPS if that: https://atilanevesoncode.wordpress.com/2018/12/31/comparing-pythagorean-triples-in-c-d-and-rust/
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Friday, 18 January 2019 at 08:55:23 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote: D really needs its killer use case if it is to move away from that list. D is a lot like Scala on the JVM: Both language have myriads of language features and bells and whistles, but there is no killer feature in the language itself. Rust and Go have that: Rust has safe manual memory management and Go has an excellent threading model with communicating sequential processes (aka goroutines). Scala didn't make it anywhere until Akka came along beind developed in Scala. Then came Play, Spark and Kafka - all developed in Scala. Either the language has a killer feature or there must be a killer application written in it. For D the latter applies as it does not have a killer feature in the language. Build CSP into D or manual memory management as in Rust. CSP without a GC is difficult (that's one reason why Go has a GC) and Go has a very good GC. I don't think marketing is a requirement. Rust and Go also received no big marketing. Their respective killer feature paved the way as those things were needed. Then people just take it and use it.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Friday, 18 January 2019 at 08:55:23 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote: D really needs its killer use case if it is to move away from that list. For me those would be superior metaprogramming and ability to interface with C++, Objective-C and C in superior ways. But some project must show those strong points. I think migrating the critical point to migrate to another language is usually compatibility. D does many things well and compatibility and metaprogramming are two of those. But I think it is more a matter of bad marketing than the fact that it does not do it well.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Friday, 18 January 2019 at 08:55:23 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote: Apparently Google is ramping up the use of Rust in Fuchsia and hiring quite a few devs. Azure IoT Edge uses a mix of C# and Rust. Rust has lately got a lot of attention from game developers. Several game studios announced they are switching from C++ to Rust. I think the developing compile to WebAssembly story is helping with that as well, because people can compile their games to web platform.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Friday, 18 January 2019 at 03:41:38 UTC, Brian wrote: On Monday, 14 January 2019 at 20:21:25 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: Of possible interest: https://www.technotification.com/2019/01/most-underrated-programming-languages.html Because no software can use it. examples: 1. Docker use golang. 2. Middleware system use java. 3. Shell use python. 4. AI use python and R. 5. Desktop application use QT / C#. 6. Web framework & database use php's laravel and java's sprint-boot. 7. Web use Javascript / typescript. Google is using Go for gVisor and Fuchsia, MIT for Biscuit, TUM (Munich) for userspache high performance network drivers, in spite of the naysayers regarding Go and systems programming. Apparently Google is ramping up the use of Rust in Fuchsia and hiring quite a few devs. Azure IoT Edge uses a mix of C# and Rust. C# support for low level systems programing is looking better every release since they started integrated Midori lessons into it, while making it beat TechEmpower and working closely with Unity. Now C# support is started to be a thing all AAA devs wish for on their game engines, even if only for gameplay scripts, while Unity is betting down in improving C# AOT compilation via their HPC# subset (C#'s -betterC in IL2CPP). D really needs its killer use case if it is to move away from that list.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Monday, 14 January 2019 at 20:21:25 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: Of possible interest: https://www.technotification.com/2019/01/most-underrated-programming-languages.html Because no software can use it. examples: 1. Docker use golang. 2. Middleware system use java. 3. Shell use python. 4. AI use python and R. 5. Desktop application use QT / C#. 6. Web framework & database use php's laravel and java's sprint-boot. 7. Web use Javascript / typescript.
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Friday, 18 January 2019 at 01:15:06 UTC, Bill Baxter wrote: Gotta laugh at Ruby being listed as "Underrated", though. --bb On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 12:25 PM Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: Of possible interest: https://www.technotification.com/2019/01/most-underrated-programming-languages.html I get the feeling that Ruby's popularity is waning with the rise of Node.js and the broad ecosystem of Javascript-based web application frameworks. At one time it probably came close to rivaling Python in popularity and sheer volume of new development, but I think that's firmly in the past now (not that it is dead, by any means).
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
Gotta laugh at Ruby being listed as "Underrated", though. --bb On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 12:25 PM Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: > Of possible interest: > > > https://www.technotification.com/2019/01/most-underrated-programming-languages.html >
Re: Top Five World’s Most Underrated Programming Languages
On Monday, 14 January 2019 at 20:21:25 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: Of possible interest: https://www.technotification.com/2019/01/most-underrated-programming-languages.html What's interesting here is the language nim, which perhaps has some lessons for D. https://nim-lang.org/
