http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

It will be great if D returns back to the top 20.

D community, thank you for your great work!

On Wednesday, 25 December 2013 at 09:32:39 UTC, ilya-stromberg wrote:
> http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
>
> It will be great if D returns back to the top 20.
>

Whether it measures popularity in a right way is a debatable issue, but I want to note, that in recent month (approximatly from september 2013) the way popularity is calculated was changed several times (by including/excluding search engines and adjusting for search lookups), so some language shows unexpected shifts in their positions. This destroys the usefulness of looking at the dynamics, let alone questioning validity in a first place.

Still, if one is interested in long history:

2012.04 0,328%
2012.05 0,327%
2012.06 0,339%
2012.07 0,336%
2012.08 0,332%
2012.09 0,311% <= in top
2012.10 0,284%
2012.11 0,283%
2012.12 0,281%
2013.01 0,296%
2013.02 0,297%
2013.03 0,345%
2013.04 0,314%
2013.05 0,301%
2013.06 0,474%
2013.07 0,364%
2013.08 0,567% <= 1 change in calculations
2013.09 0,331% <= 2 change in calculations
2013.10 0,337%
2013.11 0,392%
2013.12 0,552% <= 3 change in calculations

From this it can be said that D was moving downwards since Fall 2012 to summer 2013 and now tiobe cheats index and it is not clear whether it will push D up or down. Judging by changes in methodology the increase is likely to be preserved and you can speculate further that this month value underestimates growth.

Apart from TIOBE there is other index (actually many):
- http://lang-index.sourceforge.net/ Here D is down from ~13 to 21 place. It is also down in its own category (general purpose). I don't have long history here.

What is not taken into account when interpreting indexes is reflexivity: if lang is down, so nobody interested in, so lang is going even deeper down (and vice versa). I would suggest to look at usage indexes rather than at popularity ones.

> D community, thank you for your great work!

I would say it mostly due to limited number of people working in dmd/druntime/phobos (names can be obtained from git log) rather than to community which generates talks in newsgroups and unimplemented DIPs.

On Wednesday, 25 December 2013 at 10:20:13 UTC, Maxim Fomin wrote:
> On Wednesday, 25 December 2013 at 09:32:39 UTC, ilya-stromberg wrote:
>> D community, thank you for your great work!
>
> I would say it mostly due to limited number of people working in dmd/druntime/phobos (names can be obtained from git log) rather than to community which generates talks in newsgroups and unimplemented DIPs.

Surely not everyone can contribute to the core tools, but the community can put out good D libraries/apps or evangelize D in their circles.

What D needs is a killer app, something that can really showcase its abilities.  Obj-C went from obscurity to top 4 in TIOBE by riding the popularity of iOS.  Ruby was nowhere before rails.  I'm sure Android has buoyed Java in recent years.

Frankly, I'm surprised D hasn't produced a killer app/project yet, but then to really show D off would take a pretty ambitious project, probably something at least moderately mathematical or scientific to showcase its strengths.  Or perhaps an existing popular and efficient tool re-implemented in D and done better with its modeling power, say git or some better DVCS implemented in D.  AFAICT, Vibe.d would be my nominee right now.

As far as I'm concerned, Walter and the other core contributors have done their part: D is a great tool to use.  I know there are complaints about regressions and other bugs, especially from you, but ruby was likely much worse and that didn't stop rails from taking off, just ask Zed Shaw. ;)

I look forward to the killer app the D community comes up with. :)

I've actually been thinking about D's future and what its killer applications could very well be.


I actually don't believe in gui apps is D's strong point. Even if we get a gui lib sorted out. The only exception I see for this is an IDE which supports a good few languages, Java, c/c++, asm, lua, python, D. Just to name a few. Probably R as well.
Maybe little console utility apps would do well. Phobos has a wee way to go before that is doable in most cases.
Game development definitely. But for that we need somebody to actually build a pretty good game engine and then show it off using a game.
Server infrastructure. Well thats been proven already. Thank you Sociomantic.

Lastly web development. This I believe to be our biggest chance. With Java going down hill we can take over a lot of development that would have gone into JSP apps.
We actually have a good language for it. Which I was very unsure about when I started using it for that.
There is three different times in a D app that you can do init and overhead stuff. Compile time, start of runtime and during runtime (aka when you need it). PHP only has during runtime (more of less when you need it). Java has on init (so start) and when you need it.
This is an absolutely amazing thing that I can't stress enough to being great for web development. Huge amount of processing can be taken out of a website during runtime.
There is a big down side to this though. It takes longer to do something like an ORM. Just basic mapping takes longer. As we have so much more to take in.


I think web development is where our biggest potential is for. Not actually scientific or mathematical in nature.
Because of this, part of my design with DOOGLE is to make the abstraction in such a way that it should be possible to build almost identical (in code) desktop and web apps. If we had this alone, things like IDE's would become very attractive to dev's. Write one interface in code and have it usable in whole bunch of mediums.

Because of the web development nature, there is one specific project I believe to be key to show this off. A CMS. But to do this effectively we need things like a good router, ORM and all that type of thing. Not to mention lack of sql based database support in vibe currently.

On Thursday, 26 December 2013 at 01:02:40 UTC, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
> I've actually been thinking about D's future and what its killer applications could very well be.
>
>
> I actually don't believe in gui apps is D's strong point. Even if we get a gui lib sorted out. The only exception I see for this is an IDE which supports a good few languages, Java, c/c++, asm, lua, python, D. Just to name a few. Probably R as well.
Yeah, D doesn't seem to have any great success stories on the GUI front, though there have been some apps.

> Maybe little console utility apps would do well. Phobos has a wee way to go before that is doable in most cases.
Perhaps a port of busybox or Android's toolbox utilities to D would be a good demo:

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+/master/toolbox/

> Game development definitely. But for that we need somebody to actually build a pretty good game engine and then show it off using a game.
Benjamin Thaut wrote a nice game demo, there may be more out there:

http://3d.benjamin-thaut.de/?p=20

> I think web development is where our biggest potential is for. Not actually scientific or mathematical in nature.
> Because of this, part of my design with DOOGLE is to make the abstraction in such a way that it should be possible to build almost identical (in code) desktop and web apps. If we had this alone, things like IDE's would become very attractive to dev's. Write one interface in code and have it usable in whole bunch of mediums.
>
> Because of the web development nature, there is one specific project I believe to be key to show this off. A CMS. But to do this effectively we need things like a good router, ORM and all that type of thing. Not to mention lack of sql based database support in vibe currently.

The problem with web devs is that D is too heavy for them.  This is why most of them use php, maybe ruby or java, and not C++.  I think D doing well in web dev is a lost cause, better to focus on native GUI apps, especially on mobile.  Vibe.d is a great project, but I don't see it ever catching on in the wider web dev community.

The great thing about D is that it would be a good base for creating completely new tools and technologies.  That is why it is tough to imagine what will bubble up, as it will be up to the imagination of the D programmer.

However, getting D going on mobile might be important, as that seems to be where all the creativity is these days.  Paul Thurrott keeps pointing out that the top two installed Windows apps are Chrome and iTunes, both of which exist to take users away from Windows to other platforms:

http://windowsitpro.com/windows-8/windows-desktop-death

The rest of the top 10 are all "system utilities that include antivirus/malware applications and those silly little tools that make Windows 8 look and work more like Windows 7."  If desktop computers and Windows are dying and mobile is the future, D needs to be on mobile, especially since D will be more efficient and better-suited to mobile constraints.

>> Game development definitely. But for that we need somebody to actually build a pretty good game engine and then show it off using a game.
> Benjamin Thaut wrote a nice game demo, there may be more out there:
>
> http://3d.benjamin-thaut.de/?p=20

Not quite enough to show this off though.

>> I think web development is where our biggest potential is for. Not actually scientific or mathematical in nature.
>> Because of this, part of my design with DOOGLE is to make the abstraction in such a way that it should be possible to build almost identical (in code) desktop and web apps. If we had this alone, things like IDE's would become very attractive to dev's. Write one interface in code and have it usable in whole bunch of mediums.
>>
>> Because of the web development nature, there is one specific project I believe to be key to show this off. A CMS. But to do this effectively we need things like a good router, ORM and all that type of thing. Not to mention lack of sql based database support in vibe currently.
>
> The problem with web devs is that D is too heavy for them.  This is why most of them use php, maybe ruby or java, and not C++.  I think D doing well in web dev is a lost cause, better to focus on native GUI apps, especially on mobile.  Vibe.d is a great project, but I don't see it ever catching on in the wider web dev community.
>
> The great thing about D is that it would be a good base for creating completely new tools and technologies.  That is why it is tough to imagine what will bubble up, as it will be up to the imagination of the D programmer.
>
> However, getting D going on mobile might be important, as that seems to be where all the creativity is these days.  Paul Thurrott keeps pointing out that the top two installed Windows apps are Chrome and iTunes, both of which exist to take users away from Windows to other platforms:
>
> http://windowsitpro.com/windows-8/windows-desktop-death
>
> The rest of the top 10 are all "system utilities that include antivirus/malware applications and those silly little tools that make Windows 8 look and work more like Windows 7."  If desktop computers and Windows are dying and mobile is the future, D needs to be on mobile, especially since D will be more efficient and better-suited to mobile constraints.

I disagree with D not having a good chance at web development. PHP is a good language for small to medium sites that need to be done quickly. But if you need to scale or do anything complex its really not a good solution. This is the market I believe D does have a chance with especially with Java decline from grace.

As you said about mobile, sure but that would limit to basically windows mobile. Once we have ARM support. Android has issues as a lot of api is in Java not native. So wrapping with JNI would be required which would be bad. With iOS would need extern Objective-C support and to get toolchain approved by Apple, which I don't see happening anytime soon.

Even if we do disclude app side of things, mobile apps quite often have a web service component as well. But thats web development essentially.

I'm not expecting D to be bigger than e.g. PHP for example but we definitely can be a good alternative.

Guys, lets not waste too much energy debating what the killer-app for D may or may not end up being. We have no idea what it will be or when it will happen. Let's just focus on building a high-quality language and tool-chain so that someone can build said killer-app.

-- 
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/

On Thursday, 26 December 2013 at 03:34:55 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> The problem with web devs is that D is too heavy for them.  This is why most of them use php, maybe ruby or java, and not C++.  I think D doing well in web dev is a lost cause, better to focus on native GUI apps, especially on mobile.  Vibe.d is a great project, but I don't see it ever catching on in the wider web dev community.

Too heavy for some casual developers perhaps, but the speed advantage of D might be worth it for those who have higher server loads to contend with.

On Thursday, 26 December 2013 at 05:55:08 UTC, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
> I disagree with D not having a good chance at web development. PHP is a good language for small to medium sites that need to be done quickly. But if you need to scale or do anything complex its really not a good solution. This is the market I believe D does have a chance with especially with Java decline from grace.

If everybody needed to scale or do something complex, why would php still be so popular?  Most sites aren't facebook, turning their php into C++ over time. ;) I agree that D could have a niche on the performant side of web dev, taking over for Java a bit, but that's not a huge piece of the market.

> As you said about mobile, sure but that would limit to basically windows mobile. Once we have ARM support. Android has issues as a lot of api is in Java not native. So wrapping with JNI would be required which would be bad. With iOS would need extern Objective-C support and to get toolchain approved by Apple, which I don't see happening anytime soon.

I wonder how hard it is to integrate non-Microsoft languages with WinRT and Metro.  Android has a lot of native support these days- you can build completely native apks if you want- but yeah, JNI is necessary for some APIs.  I don't see why that's "bad," just the price of being on Android, as you're going to need to integrate with the platform APIs everywhere.

Does iOS really require Apple to bless your toolchain?  Free Pascal has iOS support and I doubt Apple ever approved them.  The iOS developer agreement says you can't use interpreted code, which they put in there to block Flash, but I don't think they require approval of your toolchain if it's producing native binaries.  I'd never develop for iOS though, so I don't know for sure.

> Even if we do disclude app side of things, mobile apps quite often have a web service component as well. But thats web development essentially.

Not really.  Just because you're using HTTP for transport, to avoid firewalls or whatever, doesn't make it "web development."  In fact, mobile is leading to a lot of innovation in networking protocols, so web services are not necessary:

https://www.belshe.com/2013/01/31/custom-protocols-everywhere/

On Thursday, 26 December 2013 at 07:29:28 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> Guys, lets not waste too much energy debating what the killer-app for D may or may not end up being. We have no idea what it will be or when it will happen. Let's just focus on building a high-quality language and tool-chain so that someone can build said killer-app.

Just spitballing. :) Who knows?  Maybe somebody will take an idea from this thread and run with it.

On Thursday, 26 December 2013 at 09:03:30 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
> On Thursday, 26 December 2013 at 03:34:55 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> The problem with web devs is that D is too heavy for them.  This is why most of them use php, maybe ruby or java, and not C++.  I think D doing well in web dev is a lost cause, better to focus on native GUI apps, especially on mobile.  Vibe.d is a great project, but I don't see it ever catching on in the wider web dev community.
>
> Too heavy for some casual developers perhaps, but the speed advantage of D might be worth it for those who have higher server loads to contend with.

In that case, why aren't they using C++ already?  If the argument is that D is as performant as C++ but as easy to use as ruby, so it will crack that niche, I think D is far from being that easy.

For example, how many java or ruby programmers, forget about php, ;) think about static vs dynamic arrays?  That leads to questions like this one:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9245539/what-is-the-point-of-having-static-arrays

These kinds of issues leak out in D all over the place and represent a barrier for the average web dev.  Don't get me wrong, I think D does a remarkable job of smoothing the rough edges of C/C++.  I just don't think D will ever be suited for most of that web dev niche and that's fine.  The high-end, performant sites who might resort to C++ normally can still use D, and the more numerous, smaller webapps can use the scripting framework du jour, whether rails or node.

On 2013-12-25 8:01 PM, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
> I think web development is where our biggest potential is for. Not
> actually scientific or mathematical in nature.
> Because of this, part of my design with DOOGLE is to make the
> abstraction in such a way that it should be possible to build almost
> identical (in code) desktop and web apps. If we had this alone, things
> like IDE's would become very attractive to dev's. Write one interface in
> code and have it usable in whole bunch of mediums.
>
> Because of the web development nature, there is one specific project I
> believe to be key to show this off. A CMS. But to do this effectively we
> need things like a good router, ORM and all that type of thing. Not to
> mention lack of sql based database support in vibe currently.

I'm working on a Framework/CMS where all controllers are in oData so you can create desktop/mobile applications in e.g. OpenUI5 - this allows compiling the D Language into a Desktop/Mobile application with Javascript UI with under 4 mb.

Every library e.g. Users (core) would be in oData, with the ability to add fields and relations when loading your own library with a consistent db e.g. sqlite/mongodb. There would be oData connectors for each db. All libraries simply add up to create the final application with a unified database/oData object per domain services. You could call the oData remotely, but you can also issue calls internally to the host-local services to build a HTML frontend in vibe.d with oData controller.

There's tons of things I'm planning for this framework. It's going to be a little like a kernel with hooks & event handlers, but with the settings in Lua pre-runtime. API is being developed here: https://github.com/GlobecSys/w3Vibe

I'm looking forward to some comments, I'm only going to plan the structure for a few more days