Permalink
Reply
On Friday, 27 September 2024 at 18:49:27 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:
>In your opinion, what is the selling point of D, the top 3 use cases where D would be a nice fit?
D has struggled to find a niche (because it's so flexible?), but is that also why it hasn't seen wider adoption?
What do you think are the top 3 places where you think "I could use D here instead of {language} because {reasons}"?
I dont know what it would be useful for in the wider context of software development I will just explain my use case.
I work in a fast paced industry where there are new things every single week, its art based and I need to write scripts to generate things very quickly they are one off and never used again, D is better for this than most other languages the only languages I found that were better for scripting were languages like Common lisp, scheme, and julia, languages like that are fast to write and fast to run. (obviously not including libraries otherwise python would be the best, as I prefer to write the code and not use libraries)
my second use case is long term production code for generating things for work, it needs to work for a long time, and be extended with scripts in emergencies, the production code also needs to be graphical at least at some point.
D is the only language I have found that allows me to do both the scripting workflow and production workflow in one language, every single other language I have tried has some major barrier, I checked dozens of programming languages, most have obvious issues where I didnt need to write any code to see it wasnt useful, like I refuse to use an interpreted language, or were too new for me to trust as I am going to be using the language for many years.
I think one reason people dont use D is because its good at everything, its good at scripting and production code, but for scripting its not as good as other languages, and for production code its not as good as other languages, most people are extreme in either of those directions, few people want balance, thus why they use Rust or Go for production, and python for scripting.
realistically I think its easy to prove its a dumb approach as many companies have spent millions of dollars re writing there python back-ends in faster languages, if they would have used D it literally would have saved millions of dollars, it should be an easy sell, D will save you money because worse case scenario you can always make your code faster, if you cant its a problems with your skills, not the language.
so to answer your questions D's best niche at least in my opinion is any situation where its a good idea to write a script first and write production code later, which is virtually everything.