On Tuesday, 26 September 2023 at 15:55:36 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> I doubt that there's any realistic scenario where D will ever be a big player in web development.
I also doubt it because C# is practically perfect for web development. I think D would be good at web development, but not something to drop dotnet over.
I feel like D is really good at writing solid business logic that is predictable about how it will behave and perform. I don't need 500 frameworks to write usable code in D and I can use language features to tighten it up and reduce chances for mistakes. And the performance is good and you can reason about it. Also, I can do pretty much anything I want in it.
I think the typical way the people find new languages is #1 school or job and that's not going to favor D any time soon. However, basically everyone goes and explores other languages. Think about when you explored a language. Why did you do it?
In my experience, it usually boils down to having a specific project, finding a language that has that niche and doing the project. Once you do that, if the experience was decent, you give it another chance. Maybe you keep working on that original program. If it goes well, you naturally reach out for that language again for a future project. (I understand people try new languages, but unless they get a job, I rarely see them stick with it.)
For example, I set out to write a game (niche). I looked at game engines and languages. No engines really supported the game I was making. I really liked C and Java but I had problems with both. So I stumbled on D. I had a good experience and I have come back ever since. I wrote the game again in D2. It was a great choice. I bought Andrei Alexandrescu's book and it was like a revelation. C-syntax with garbage collection and classes is good enough. The threading model, the direct memory access through pointers, bindings to C libraries and good performance really made me feel proud of what I had created. So since then, I've been committed.
When I was running, my running partner collected data on his watch. He would dump the times, locations and elevations to me and I used excel to process it. I would calculate our best mile, our best 200m, how much hills affected our run and everything. It was slow, but it didn't need to be fast. The first version probably took me an hour and had most of what we wanted. As a result of the success, I always turn to excel or google sheets first for stuff like that now.
I think D is barely lacking, but is lacking in every part of this process. People have come to D over the years. I think a lot of that is because if there a problem is no other language has focused on, D is by default a good choice because it is at least good at everything. In that sense, D has had good niches. In fact, D is one of the most common uncommon languages among older programmers. I was talking to someone at my work about the future of programming and mentioned D and I was right, he had used it before. So why is there a problem with niches? Because other languages and libraries for those languages have come a long way. And D hasn't kept up.
There is no start to finish niche (for me) that D is good at. If I want to crunch numbers, I turn to excel. If I want to make a UI, I necessarily turn to Javascript/html and a self-loathing or else .NET and XAML. If I want to make a web backend, I can use dotnet or many people would use Java Spring or node.js. I mean, I can write a webserver in express.js in 20 minutes. As far as I can tell, there isn't a real good game engine solution in D yet (I haven't checked in a few years.) Now, if I just need a command line program, you better believe I'm writing it in D. Mostly the same for a TCP server. So, in my estimation, D doesn't have that start to finish experience that makes it strong in some niche.
I want to emphasize that D is great for writing from scratch, so in my opinion for any new niche that emerges it's automatically a top player and that is a huge strength that keeps bringing people in.
Once they get here, they might not have that smooth, successful experience. T
They might be scared off by the lack of tooling. Most newer developers are used to tik tok, youtube and sub-20 minute tutorials. They are not used to learning a command line and having to actually learn language syntax from the get-go without IDE help. They are not used to having to look up documentation on libraries. The IDE just tells them with intellisense or module suggestion. Older developers are probably more open to lesser tooling in exchange for a better language.
The library situation might leave a bad taste in their mouth. The standard library surprises me often with the functions it does have. However, it can be a bit hard to find them. If I were new, I would never think to look for string functions in std.algorithm. Also, some functions exist but are named differently than in every other language. I feel like that's fine, but it makes them hard to find. The documentation for the standard library has gotten much better since years ago, but it sometimes misses an essential example. Now that I understand the method signatures, this is not an issue, but it has been a big one in the past. When you don't understand the standard types or temples, the syntax of a simple function in the standard library can be difficult. I have thought about writing a book giving a tour of the standard library but my personal life does not allow for the time commitment I would need.
Then there is the lack of third party libraries. Even if you find one, it might not compile anymore or the tutorial you are using might be so out of date it doesn't work anymore. That even goes for libraries that are just bindings.
Andrei's book was essential for me to be successful with my D2 game. It did a good job making sense of the language features. Until I had that, I didn't even know why I wasn't allowed to cast an immutable to not immutable and vice versa. I understand in theory why it could be bad and appreciate it, but I didn't understand D was enforcing that. There were probably 10 or 20 of these gotchas that all piled onto each other and made reasoning difficult. The compiler errors are often no help. If it weren't for the book, I would have been lost.
Then there are things that need to be cleaned up and that is vying with not breaking existing code. I think that balance, or strategy rather, will be the key for D's success in the years ahead.
I think D is in a unique place being good at everything and not having a lot of dependencies. I think the industry is reaching a turning point where people will say enough is enough with all the frameworks. Then there are the tools that hang while they index or do intellisense. And, frankly, Java, Javascript and even Python are using so many third party libraries and frameworks these days that when something goes wrong, it is often the case that no one at a smaller company will be able to figure it out. Performance issues are taking up more time and money. And then there are the litany of security issues that arise from the interactions of hundreds of libraries. I don't think it's a sustainable path and a few co-workers have mentioned this to me as well.
Just as kind of an aside, but you can already see bugs affecting a lot of life. There were some examples in the 2019 Dconf presentation "All Spreadsheets Must Die". I was talking with one of the people at my new job and they complained about the state of software. I told them I knew all about that. They said I had normalized it and I didn't realize. So I wrote them all down. I wrote dozens of things that week with at least one major issue a day from a XSS vulnerability at my credit card website and a financial website being unavailable to my plane decompressing! (To be sure, that might have been hardware.)
I do web development for a living, but I still cringe every time I have to do front end work. Right now, I'm off and on trying to make D work as a front end language. Failing that, whatever language ends up being good for desktop UI development is going to draw me in with that niche. I'll still use D, but that language is going to earn a place at my table even if it's horrible at most everything else.
I love D. I love the built in threads and messaging. I love the succinctness of associative arrays and lists. I sometimes love immutability. I like templates. I love that there is a GC option. There is so much more that I like and more that I just take for granted.
I think a lot of other people would if they gave it a chance and I think I outlined the reasons. Like I said, D is at least good in basically every way. The issues I mentioned are not difficult, they just take work. I don't think any of these issues are as large as those facing other languages like C++ and Java. As for me, I hope I get time to contribute more to the D community and I'm happy with the direction it's going.
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