Sorry for that title, but this is something I have been thinking about for a while...

I honestly feel like D is a failure. I kinda just wanted to vent about it and see what other people think.

I have been using D since around 2012 or 2013, instantly fell in love, use to post on the forms a lot under the name Tofu Ninja. I was convinced D was the future but since then I have become disheartened. The biggest thing that makes me feel like this is that in the 7 years I have been using D I literally have never met another programmer IRL who has even heard of it. I put on my resume that I like D and every interview I get asked about it, having to explain what D even is because they have never heard of it. I have never seen a job posting listing D. Never see any projects pop up on /r/programming using D. It feels like to the rest of the programming universe, D doesn't even exist. Sometimes I see threads on reddit like "what's your favorite programming language" and I always look for D but never find it.

And honestly I don't think that is going to change. I feel like D has failed.

I duno... what do yall think? Is D going to somehow explode in popularity in 5-10 years? Am I missing some part of the picture? Or am I right and if so what can be done about it?

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
> Sorry for that title, but this is something I have been thinking about for a while...

No. It hasn't failed. However that's true, it doesn't have the wide recognition that say Go or Rust get at the moment. It's more behind the scenes, around the same level of popularity as Nim, Crystal. Also, D community doesn't frequent places like Reddit often, most of the activity is done here in forum or through Github issues for relevant projects. Still, when a project related to D shows up on /r/programming it often brings a lot of curiosity or people saying that they use D, it's just they don't have anything to show for it yet.

But even these languages are not as popular as one would think. I work as a programmer, I often talk to my coworkers and they look at me funny when I mention languages like D, Dart, TypeScript, Go or Rust. They only know C, C++, Java, Javascript and C#, other languages don't exist to them.

I don't think D will explode in popularity in the future. D isn't a very opinionated language. It's working through evolution rather than revolution. It's based around stable growth rather than flashy features.

It could be argued though, that some of the design decisions are slowing the growth of the language. For example the whole GC/runtime thing makes it hard to deploy to web/webassembly, an area that Rust is actively conquering right now. Sure, we have betterC, but it's not really helpful in this case.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
> It feels like to the rest of the programming universe, D doesn't even exist. Sometimes I see threads on reddit like "what's your favorite programming language" and I always look for D but never find it.

What do you think of other languages? Is java great? Did you write an Electron program? Maybe PHP?

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
> Sorry for that title, but this is something I have been thinking about for a while...
>
> I honestly feel like D is a failure. I kinda just wanted to vent about it and see what other people think.
>
> I have been using D since around 2012 or 2013, instantly fell in love, use to post on the forms a lot under the name Tofu Ninja. I was convinced D was the future but since then I have become disheartened. The biggest thing that makes me feel like this is that in the 7 years I have been using D I literally have never met another programmer IRL who has even heard of it. I put on my resume that I like D and every interview I get asked about it, having to explain what D even is because they have never heard of it. I have never seen a job posting listing D. Never see any projects pop up on /r/programming using D. It feels like to the rest of the programming universe, D doesn't even exist. Sometimes I see threads on reddit like "what's your favorite programming language" and I always look for D but never find it.
>
> And honestly I don't think that is going to change. I feel like D has failed.
>
> I duno... what do yall think? Is D going to somehow explode in popularity in 5-10 years? Am I missing some part of the picture? Or am I right and if so what can be done about it?

if too fell in love with it, about the same time. i completely gave up on it.
gc, slow evolution and extremely opinionated group. i watch for the sake of the old days.
who knows it? sometimes i meet programmers who know about it, but when taking to them nobody plans to do something with it. its an gc experiment with endless features - and more coming. They and i feel - not usable in the company world.

cheers

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
> Sorry for that title, but this is something I have been thinking about for a while...
>
> I honestly feel like D is a failure. I kinda just wanted to vent about it and see what other people think.
>
> I have been using D since around 2012 or 2013, instantly fell in love, use to post on the forms a lot under the name Tofu Ninja. I was convinced D was the future but since then I have become disheartened. The biggest thing that makes me feel like this is that in the 7 years I have been using D I literally have never met another programmer IRL who has even heard of it. I put on my resume that I like D and every interview I get asked about it, having to explain what D even is because they have never heard of it. I have never seen a job posting listing D. Never see any projects pop up on /r/programming using D. It feels like to the rest of the programming universe, D doesn't even exist. Sometimes I see threads on reddit like "what's your favorite programming language" and I always look for D but never find it.
>
> And honestly I don't think that is going to change. I feel like D has failed.
>
> I duno... what do yall think? Is D going to somehow explode in popularity in 5-10 years? Am I missing some part of the picture? Or am I right and if so what can be done about it?

D is a hidden treasure, not many developers know it. But once you know it, you immediately fell in love. It is just superior to other languages currently available, in my opinion.

At this point in time D got quite mature. It can be used in really large companies with great success.

In my opinion it is now at the community to tell other developers about this great language, create articles, create content. .
This is now the most important thing, advertising done by the people who uses D.

Kind regards
Andre

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
> Sorry for that title, but this is something I have been thinking about for a while...
>
> I honestly feel like D is a failure. I kinda just wanted to vent about it and see what other people think.
>
> I have been using D since around 2012 or 2013, instantly fell in love, use to post on the forms a lot under the name Tofu Ninja. I was convinced D was the future but since then I have become disheartened. The biggest thing that makes me feel like this is that in the 7 years I have been using D I literally have never met another programmer IRL who has even heard of it. I put on my resume that I like D and every interview I get asked about it, having to explain what D even is because they have never heard of it. I have never seen a job posting listing D. Never see any projects pop up on /r/programming using D. It feels like to the rest of the programming universe, D doesn't even exist. Sometimes I see threads on reddit like "what's your favorite programming language" and I always look for D but never find it.
>
> And honestly I don't think that is going to change. I feel like D has failed.
>
> I duno... what do yall think? Is D going to somehow explode in popularity in 5-10 years? Am I missing some part of the picture? Or am I right and if so what can be done about it?

Yes D has failed if the goal is wide adoption. It will never gain wide recognition and use because the D community fails to realize that it's more than just the compiler and libraries.

What makes a compiler successful is not just the compiler itself but the easy to create real world business solutions by the mass of programmers in the world. Such people are not interested in wasting their time trying to get things to work, they want a product that will allow them to get as much work done in the shorted amount of time. D fails miserably at that in the real world.

D has no decent gui, gui designer, no decent audio library, no decent graphics library, no decent anything. The D community thinks that if it has a binding then it must be the same. Bindings are not solutions. One is just working in C, so what is the point of D then?

When you look at the most successful compilers you will see they have a huge amount of resources available that work without issue.

Essentially D costs too much and has too little in return. After all, you can pretty much do everything you want in C++ that you can do with D.

Imagine, hypothetically, if when C++ was invented it was actually the D language.

The sole reason that D has failed is the management of D has failed... and, of course, they will never accept that truth. They believe their methods are correct and working and the failure is not due to them. D is actually an old language and there are many new languages popping up like weeds... eventually D will not be so shiny and more and it will just become another weed. That is already happening actually.  As many languages modify their designs to include what was great about D, D becomes less attractive.

So, D started out with a bang but will finish as a whimper. It neglected so many important aspects of programming that it shot itself in the foot. Over time it won't be able to recover from this unless things seriously change about how it is managed. It is failed to reach escape velocity.

Most programmers don't give a shit about meta programming and all the cool shit D can do. So what is the point of them using it when most other things suck? All the effort that D wasted in library after library could have been focused on creating the things that users want/need but the libraries are now defunct and are bit rotting.

Eventually people will give up on maintaining D(in 10-20 years when new processors are out that require massive updating of D or a new OS comes about). D will die a slow and painful death. It didn't have to be that way but that is the outcome when you don't plan properly.  It has happened many times with many things... It's nature at work.

At most D could hope to do is get a large company with the resources to take it over like Microsoft... but they have no incentive to do that. Since D can integrate with C/C++ there is potential. But why would they do such a thing when they can just modify C++?

D has never been used for a major commercial app. It touts all it's uses, which is minuscule compared to the major players and most of these use cases are more it computing applications/utilities than anything major. I believe D is a failure for very complex real world apps. It just can't handle the load. A large business isn't going to waste it's time with something that has so many drawbacks and few benefits... it makes no sense to them to use D for anything serious. Even though D can be used to write specific code, since it does not perfectly integrate what is the point of just not writing it in the main language, even if it requires a little more work?

The only thing D has been really successful at is it's language design but that isn't enough to do much in this world.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
> Sorry for that title, but this is something I have been thinking about for a while...
>
> I honestly feel like D is a failure. I kinda just wanted to vent about it and see what other people think.
>
> I have been using D since around 2012 or 2013, instantly fell in love, use to post on the forms a lot under the name Tofu Ninja. I was convinced D was the future but since then I have become disheartened. The biggest thing that makes me feel like this is that in the 7 years I have been using D I literally have never met another programmer IRL who has even heard of it. I put on my resume that I like D and every interview I get asked about it, having to explain what D even is because they have never heard of it. I have never seen a job posting listing D. Never see any projects pop up on /r/programming using D. It feels like to the rest of the programming universe, D doesn't even exist. Sometimes I see threads on reddit like "what's your favorite programming language" and I always look for D but never find it.
>
> And honestly I don't think that is going to change. I feel like D has failed.
>
> I duno... what do yall think? Is D going to somehow explode in popularity in 5-10 years? Am I missing some part of the picture? Or am I right and if so what can be done about it?

Meeting your popularity expectations, yes, I would say it has failed.

But, I would say this is also a great thing, being popular is not necessary a good thing all the time.
I'm amazed by how much a group of passionate people with little corporate support can achieve, you have to check the PRs on Github and the lively discussions on this forum.

I would be more worried if Dlang would lose its contributors critical mass. I have witnessed during the years some talented people leaving the community, mostly due to friction with how things were run or communicated. Recently there is a breath of fresh air, as vision and attitude toward setting goals and clearly communicating them to the community coming from Andrei and Walter. The result, some old dissharted contributors have re-joined and started to do Great&Right Work™.

There are also pretty encouraging signals from the students joining the D GSoC program. We should capture their interest, and keep some of the talented ones as contributors.

What matters in the end is that Dlang stays true to its core principles, native system programing with pragmatic productivity, and keeps improving quality across the board.

People, including myself, are using Dlang for interesting work, so for a group of us this is not a silly language experiment. It brings home the bacon, so to speak.
Maybe we are not very vocal as other communities are but D runs a bunch of systems, commercial or not, already.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 09:56:48 UTC, Nierjerson wrote:
> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
>> [...]
>
> Yes D has failed if the goal is wide adoption. It will never gain wide recognition and use because the D community fails to realize that it's more than just the compiler and libraries.
>
> [...]

This seems to be a quite pessimistic view based on wrong information. There are definitely succesful companies using D for their applications or additional tooling.

Some of these companies you can see in the list on dlang.org, some others do just not announce which language they use, they simply use the best language for the job, which is D.

Kind regards
Andre

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 10:19:10 UTC, Andre Pany wrote:
> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 09:56:48 UTC, Nierjerson wrote:
>> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
>> Yes D has failed if the goal is wide adoption. It will never gain wide recognition and use because the D community fails to realize that it's more than just the compiler and libraries.
>>
>> [...]
>
> This seems to be a quite pessimistic view based on wrong information. There are definitely succesful companies using D for their applications or additional tooling.

mini crap

>
> Some of these companies you can see in the list on dlang.org, some others do just not announce which language they use, they simply use the best language for the job, which is D.
>
> Kind regards
> Andre

but i understand you, i didn't want think about the dying process of my mother either.
the gentleman above was wright:
D has no decent gui, gui designer, no decent audio library, no decent graphics library, no decent anything. The D community thinks that if it has a binding then it must be the same. Bindings are not solutions.
Most programmers don't give a shit about meta programming and all the cool shit D can do. So what is the point of them using it when most other things suck?

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 10:30:56 UTC, silentwatcher wrote:
> D has no decent gui, gui designer, no decent audio library, no
> decent graphics library,

4/4 for libraries I wouldn't care the slightest about, and wouldn't
consider when evaluating whether a language was useful or not.

If a server needs a GUI, it can serve HTML.