On Wednesday, 27 July 2016 at 10:39:52 UTC, NX wrote:
> Lack of production quality tools

like? no, "refactoring" and other crap is not "production quality tools", they are only useful to pretend that you are doing something useful, so you will look busy for your boss.

On Tuesday, 26 July 2016 at 15:11:00 UTC, llaine wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I'm using D since a few month now and I was wondering why people don't jump onto it that much and why it isn't the "big thing" already.
>
> Everybody is into javascript nowadays, but IMO even for doing web I found Vibe.d more interesting and efficient than node.js for example.
>
> I agree that you have to be pragmatic and choose the right tools for the right jobs but I would be interested to have other opinion on thoses questions.

Seriously, it could take years before D gets really popular and that's normal. Web languages have raised quickly because they were new, they weren't fighting against anything. D has C, Java and C++ plus the other "new" languages Go, Rust.

Also I predict that the more it'll get popular the less it will attract hobbyist. I did't realized at the beginning (I've discovered D in 2012 then started to learn more seriously in 2014) but Alexandrescu clairly aims at a professional usage so it'll become less and less fun.

On Wednesday, 27 July 2016 at 10:42:50 UTC, lkfsdg wrote:

> Also I predict that the more it'll get popular the less it will attract hobbyist. I did't realized at the beginning (I've discovered D in 2012 then started to learn more seriously in 2014) but Alexandrescu clairly aims at a professional usage so it'll become less and less fun.

What do you mean by that ?

On Tuesday, 26 July 2016 at 15:11:00 UTC, llaine wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I'm using D since a few month now and I was wondering why people don't jump onto it that much and why it isn't the "big thing" already.

Because languages don't become big things. Good solutions to particular problems  become big things, but D is a very good language and nothing more. So if that is your criteria for choosing a language, you might want to use something else.

D will go the route of continual improvement and increased adoption. As more and more people use it for small projects, the ecosystem will improve, and it will begin to be adopted for bigger projects.

On Wednesday, 27 July 2016 at 11:11:56 UTC, llaine wrote:
> On Wednesday, 27 July 2016 at 10:42:50 UTC, lkfsdg wrote:
>
>> Also I predict that the more it'll get popular the less it will attract hobbyist. I did't realized at the beginning (I've discovered D in 2012 then started to learn more seriously in 2014) but Alexandrescu clairly aims at a professional usage so it'll become less and less fun.
>
> What do you mean by that ?

It should be clear so let's rephrase: I think that hobbyists will be less and less attracted by D because its professionalization.

But you shouldn't attach any importance to this idea. I might be wrong, it's just that if, let's say, in five years I observe that this is true, I will be able to say "I knew it" without being biased (retrospective bias) because the idea is clearly stated. ;)

On Wednesday, 27 July 2016 at 10:17:57 UTC, NX wrote:
> On Wednesday, 27 July 2016 at 09:28:49 UTC, chmike wrote:
>> 4. Web server && IO performance (see: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks or https://github.com/nanoant/WebFrameworkBenchmark).
>
> Please, these are terribly outdated benchmarks. There was a recent bug causing Vibe.D to not scale to multiple cores at all which has been fixed.

Yes, you are right. It's not easy to determine the version of vibe.d used for techempower.

From this link it seam that version 0.7.19 of vibe.d was used Oo unless the Readme is simply outdated.   
https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/tree/master/frameworks/D/vibed

For the other one it's vibe v0.7.26 which is more recent. The performance is still low.

On Tuesday, 26 July 2016 at 15:11:00 UTC, llaine wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I'm using D since a few month now and I was wondering why people don't jump onto it that much and why it isn't the "big thing" already.
>
> Everybody is into javascript nowadays, but IMO even for doing web I found Vibe.d more interesting and efficient than node.js for example.
>
> I agree that you have to be pragmatic and choose the right tools for the right jobs but I would be interested to have other opinion on thoses questions.

My personal opinion is that the two biggest problems are

1) it has no unique selling point (USP):

Rust - memory-safety, Go/NodeJS - web app, Python/Julia - scientific computing, R - statistics, Matlab/Mathematica/Octave - numerical programming, Haskell -
pure functional, C - kernels, controllers, embedded

While the Areas of D Usage (https://dlang.org/areas-of-d-usage.html) is just a brief overview, D can compete with all of these areas.

2) It has no big player with money behind it.
Rust (Mozilla), Go (Google), NodeJs (Joyent), ... - having dedicated resources helps a lot to let a project takeoff.

That being said it's an awesome language that can rule them all, adoption is rising slowly, but steadily & hopefully with the D Foundation being a non-profit organization real money (http://forum.dlang.org/post/qaskprdxmshpabarahbf@forum.dlang.org) flows in.

On Wednesday, 27 July 2016 at 16:26:47 UTC, Seb wrote:
> On Tuesday, 26 July 2016 at 15:11:00 UTC, llaine wrote:
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> I'm using D since a few month now and I was wondering why people don't jump onto it that much and why it isn't the "big thing" already.
>>
>> Everybody is into javascript nowadays, but IMO even for doing web I found Vibe.d more interesting and efficient than node.js for example.
>>
>> I agree that you have to be pragmatic and choose the right tools for the right jobs but I would be interested to have other opinion on thoses questions.
>
> My personal opinion is that the two biggest problems are
>
> 1) it has no unique selling point (USP):
>
> Rust - memory-safety, Go/NodeJS - web app, Python/Julia - scientific computing, R - statistics, Matlab/Mathematica/Octave - numerical programming, Haskell -
> pure functional, C - kernels, controllers, embedded
>
> While the Areas of D Usage (https://dlang.org/areas-of-d-usage.html) is just a brief overview, D can compete with all of these areas.
>
> 2) It has no big player with money behind it.
> Rust (Mozilla), Go (Google), NodeJs (Joyent), ... - having dedicated resources helps a lot to let a project takeoff.
>
> That being said it's an awesome language that can rule them all, adoption is rising slowly, but steadily & hopefully with the D Foundation being a non-profit organization real money (http://forum.dlang.org/post/qaskprdxmshpabarahbf@forum.dlang.org) flows in.

I personally don't think having Corp sponsorship will all of sudden bring more ppl in.  I think it would be good to work on getting libraries to work with vibe might be a good way to bring interest/development.  I know vibe still needs work but the overall system isn't bad but its still a hassle to use w/ a DB in some instances.    I also don't believe in the "next big thing"  it's hard to compete w/ something like JS and node picked up mainly because its javascript.  If u want D to pick up in the web arena just start some projects and post about them...  Make youtube videos or whatever.  ppl aren't gonna pick it up if all they do is come to the D forums and see a ton of flame fests.  Need more positive examples of the language...  IDK if Rust is necessarily blowing up in usage I know Go has alot of steam but I would say that Docker may be the cause more than just saying its Google.  Also what about things like Hadoop or Kafka.  If D had things like this it would also pick up more traction.  There is a strong community and it tends to spend too much time on the forums complaining about A or B vs. doing things to improve exposure.

Maybe more organization for community projects would be good.  I'd say one thing that could be improved is organization within the community. Im not talking about D leadership but just community.

I've seen a couple jobs around trying to use Elixir w/ Elm on the front end.  There are ppl out there willing to try new things...

On Wednesday, 27 July 2016 at 16:26:47 UTC, Seb wrote:
> My personal opinion is that the two biggest problems are
>
> 1) it has no unique selling point (USP):

I don't necessarily agree. I think that D's USPs as seen externally are simplified and powerful metaprogramming abilities, and being a better or "cleaned-up" C++. Internally we all know that D has many USPs.

On Tuesday, 26 July 2016 at 15:11:00 UTC, llaine wrote:
> why it isn't the "big thing" already.

1. Less easy to explain

A big selling point is that D is good in all directions, and stupidly easy to apply in many situations.

That is a lot harder to explain that a simple value proposal like "let's pretend we solved multithreading!" or "let's pretend we solved bugs!".

Competitors concentrate their communications on one or two problems to be solved. D is more of an enabler thing, so many people who eg. don't know what meta-programming allows don't miss it in day-to-day operations.



2. Social Proof

I would wager that in large part the D community is vaccinated against taking decisions by social proof alone. But we need ever more stories like "that rich/trendy company is making loads of money with D".