On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 09:56:48 UTC, Nierjerson 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 post sums up a lot of my feelings towards the current state of D. The part that stood out to me the most was the part calling D an old language. More and more it feels like D is getting worse, not better, feels like more half baked language features, and almost no progress on things that matter like ease of use and tools.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:

> 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?

You have a very specific (and arbitrary) definition of failure. If the only reason to use a language is "popularity", presumably so you can financially benefit from it, then go with one of the small number of languages that are heavily used today. Language use has very little to do with the language itself. The biggest factor i determining language popularity today is language popularity five years ago. The cost to changing is too high and the benefits too small for companies to make a change.

D has succeeded in my opinion. It provides me with a language I can use to get things done. That's really all a language can do.

Are there areas that D is not the best choice? Of course. Folks complain "D doesn't work for my use case." Well C++ isn't a good choice for web development, Ruby isn't a good choice for high performance computing, Java isn't a good choice for embedded programming, and Javascript isn't a good choice for writing an operating system. That doesn't mean any of those languages has failed. There are plenty of cases where D is a good choice.

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. [...]

Well, what can I say that hasn't been said before (including this thread)? Since I said good-bye to D last year my productivity has increased incredibly. I read a few days ago that Joakim had left the community (he once asked me why my attitude had changed so drastically). And you know what, it made me kinda sad. Do things like that even register with the D Foundation  and / or community? One answer was "this would be an excellent topic for this year's GSoC", which is a total and utter lack of respect (although I hasten to say that I think the poster wasn't aware of this and didn't intend it this way). It has never occurred to the D leadership that Android and iOS are more important to developers than introducing yet another RefFancyTemplateCTFERangeAllocator which is memory safe, but not really, but it will be after DIP2001.

Now there is talk of re-writing D, after the umpteenth half baked feature was introduced. We'll see, we'll see. IMO, the trouble really started when the D Foundation was set up. Instead of streamlining and stabilizing D, the whole thing turned into a closed shop with a "Hey, we are the lads" kinda attitude, and any CS theory or fashion of the day would finally be half baked into the language without a second thought. Without paying attention to users and the answer to complaints would be "we want to turn D into a functional style memory safe [...] language, that's why we had to introduce RefFancy, so eff your code!", except it still isn't and RefFancy has to be removed or replaced! Who would have guessed it would be at loggerheads with FancyRange!?

It's the year 2019 (D is almost 20 years old), a lot of new languages have a sounder approach than D, they see what works and what doesn't, what programmers need (e.g. ARM) and what they don't need. Which is being pragmatic, and being pragmatic is a thing that D claims to be. A joke. Programmers need to get sh*t done, you know?

And apart from all the fancy feature madness, there's this arrogant attitude towards users. To avoid criticism my words were twisted in such an obvious and blatant way that it was just ridiculous. And what's really funny is that mistakes made by the leadership, and the leadership alone, are now being socialized as in "the community this, the community that, and this has to change!". Ah, give me a break.

The sad thing is that D had it all long before younger languages had it, but it preferred to drink all its money in the pub, dreaming of fancy features, mañana, mañana...

PS For D zealots: add your favorite insult here, e.g. "entitled [...]"

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 11:52:18 UTC, Chris wrote:
> [...]

AMEN +1

> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
>> 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.

Personally I've noticed both on reddit and on some non-English-speaking social networks that at least awareness about D has risen a lot in last 2-3 years. More people know it exists and some are at least familiar with its nicer features. Maybe a lot less who actually use it. IRL around me everyone knows about D, but that's because I work in a D-using company. ;)

But in general I understand your feeling. There are so many languages now, not everyone can be in top 10, so there is a lot of second-tier ones. Usable for whoever is brave enough to use them, but not mainstream. D is one of them, that's ok for me. I love such languages, be it D, OCaml, Clean, Pony or even less known ones. Shall we call "not in top-10" a failure? Depends on the original goals, I guess.


On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 09:56:48 UTC, Nierjerson 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.

With a small community, without a big corporation behind a language, it's hard to expect anything else. The situation is very similar for most second-tier languages.


> D has no decent gui, gui designer, no decent audio library, no decent graphics library, no decent anything.

Back in 2012 I used DFL for GUI on Windows (pretty decent) and it came with Entice Designer - a GUI tool for building GUIs with DFL. I guess now it's probably abandoned, but it did work ok back then. I've made a few apps with DFL. Then some more with DLangUI, another fine GUI library, even cross-platform this time. Graphics library? I dunno, what should be there that's not already in one of D libs available? For me, if it's raster graphics, being able to create bitmaps and output them is usually enough, I can do the rest by hand (I started doing graphics when it was just "mov ax, 13h; call 10h; now we have a memory-mapped 320x200 bitmap with 256 colours palette, enjoy!") People make 3D engines in D, I've made a video processing app in D and another about photo processing.
Audio processing? Probably. That's niche enough, people like p0nce do it manually in D but professionaly. Again, it's hard to expect a big variety of high-quality tools and libraries from a small community of enthusiasts. But that's only natural.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 13:10:15 UTC, thedeemon wrote:
>  "mov ax, 13h; call 10h;

Correction: "int 10h", of course. B81300CD10.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 11:52:18 UTC, Chris wrote:

> Well, what can I say that hasn't been said before (including this thread)? Since I said good-bye to D last year my productivity has increased incredibly. I read a few days ago that Joakim had left the community (he once asked me why my attitude had changed so drastically). And you know what, it made me kinda sad.

I've been ignoring these comments about Joakim, but since they keep coming up...

You can't have a successful organization where you have people going off the rails. The things he was posting were downright strange, and it would be a massive turnoff to normal people to visit the forum and see something like that. To suggest otherwise defies logic.

> PS For D zealots: add your favorite insult here, e.g. "entitled [...]"

These statements would be better left on Slashdot...they don't help your case, they make it look like you're unreasonable.

On 12.04.19 09:35, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
> 
> I honestly feel like D is a failure. I kinda just wanted to vent about it and see what other people think.

I honestly feel like D is a big success. The failure is your own.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 13:22:32 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> On 12.04.19 09:35, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
>> 
>> I honestly feel like D is a failure. I kinda just wanted to vent about it and see what other people think.
>
> I honestly feel like D is a big success. The failure is your own.

Thank You for this well thought out response, you completely changed my mind, it's obvious you took my feelings/opinion seriously...

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 11:52:18 UTC, Chris wrote:
> [stuff]...

I basically stopped visiting the forums around when the foundation started... so sorry if I am not up on all that has happened since.

Wut is all this about Joakim?