On Tuesday, 28 June 2022 at 09:10:09 UTC, Chris wrote:
> You sure can't blame the lack of marketing for D's relative obscurity. What about all the initially enthusiastic users who abandoned D for technical reasons not because of the lack of marketing? Other small open source languages attract users and contributors without much hype too.

I reject the premise of this argument. D is only "relatively obscure" if you compare it to the small handful of "superstar" languages like C, Python, Javascript, and so on. The vast majority of programming languages never achieve even D's level of popularity, and would be overjoyed to have as many users and open-source contributors as D does.

> In D's case it's not just the marketing. It's the many unresolved issues the language has (I won't reiterate them here). Harsh criticism of D usually comes from users who are / were really interested in D, not from the random developer who has to churn out silly apps for smart phones. The usual steps after discovering D are roughly like this: enthusiasm > start a project in D > experience / proficiency > slowly discover all the flaws > despair >  no remedy in sight > good-bye.

Sure, D has problems. So does everything else. If your reaction to discovering that a technology has serious flaws is to give up in despair, you may as well quit computers.

For example: you know what else has serious flaws with no remedy in sight? Files.

> We're going to look at the file "stack" starting at the top with the file API, which we'll see is nearly impossible to use correctly and that supporting multiple filesystems without corrupting data is much harder than supporting a single filesystem; move down to the filesystem, which we'll see has serious bugs that cause data loss and data corruption; and then we'll look at disks and see that disks can easily corrupt data at a rate five million times greater than claimed in vendor datasheets.

Source: https://danluu.com/deconstruct-files/

If you dig deep enough, you will eventually discover that everything is like this. Programming languages are like this, operating systems are like this, even hardware is like this. If you think you've found something that isn't like this, it's almost certainly because you aren't looking closely enough.

Dan McKinley articulates the same point in his talk, "Choose Boring Technology":

> I have noticed that every piece of software obeys this law. When you first start using it, it’s awful. It’s awful because you find all of the problems.
>
> If you are naive, you put a new thing into production, and experience this law in practice. And then you conclude from this that you should use a different thing for the next feature.
>
> [...]
>
> The new thing won’t be better, you just aren’t aware of all of the ways it will be terrible yet.

Source: https://boringtechnology.club/

The only way to find peace is to accept that (a) serious flaws in the technology we depend on are an unavoidable fact of life, and (b) in spite of that, we can still use technology to do useful things and solve real problems.

On Tuesday, 28 June 2022 at 15:20:34 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:

> I reject the premise of this argument. D is only "relatively obscure" if you compare it to the small handful of "superstar" languages like C, Python, Javascript, and so on. The vast majority of programming languages never achieve even D's level of popularity, and would be overjoyed to have as many users and open-source contributors as D does.

Yes, relatively means in relation to others. Sure, it's huge in relation to V. The point, however, is that it is members of the D community / users of D who are constantly whining about why it's not as least as big as C/C++ etc. D always strives (and claims) to be an alternative to C++, Rust, Go and whatnot. In other words, the aim is to be a "superstar" language. Of course people compare it to bigger languages. (Python and Javascript are beside the point, due to their distinct history and use cases).

>
> Sure, D has problems. So does everything else. If your reaction to discovering that a technology has serious flaws is to give up in despair, you may as well quit computers.

Oh please! So you're saying that nothing is perfect so I have to put up with D's flaws, it's my basically fault, I'm not tough enough. Please! I wonder why other languages don't make me run away in despair. I guess, because they tend to sort things out and / or their flaws don't affect my everyday work.

> For example: you know what else has serious flaws with no remedy in sight? Files.

Sure, but files don't affect my work negatively.

>
> If you dig deep enough, you will eventually discover that everything is like this. Programming languages are like this, operating systems are like this, even hardware is like this. If you think you've found something that isn't like this, it's almost certainly because you aren't looking closely enough.

Thanks for telling me. I didn't know that all technology is flawed. That's a first one. Thought is was only D, as C++ and C are perfect. But now I'll have a closer look at C, see if it has any flaws.

>
> The only way to find peace is to accept that (a) serious flaws in the technology we depend on are an unavoidable fact of life, and (b) in spite of that, we can still use technology to do useful things and solve real problems.

D, at this stage, is flawed beyond repair. It's not only a technical issue but a cultural one. If a tool keeps you from doing useful things and impedes your progress, then yes, I reserve the right to change the tool. You talk as if anyone who's ever used D is obliged to use it and may not say anything bad about it. I refuse to argue at this level.

On Tuesday, 28 June 2022 at 15:48:10 UTC, Chris wrote:
>
> D, at this stage, is flawed beyond repair. It's not only a technical issue but a cultural one.

If you view it like that, I don't see anything for you to accomplish by posting here. I suppose you are just venting your disappointment, not trying to convince us of anything?

I understand if you want to do that, but I still think you could, and ought, to do that in a less hostile tone.