I keep hearing a lot of people saying that they think that D is a "niche" language.  Did I completely miss something, or are they just misinformed?  I've never thought of D as a niche language.  I consider (and use) it as what Cpp should have been.  Like a love child from C, C++, and Python.  I'd be very interested to hear others thoughts on the subject, as well as other common misconceptions.

You could always ask, "What niche ?". You know, like web-programming is a niche, even though pretty large one.
I think "general public" does not know about even existence of D, or most of other modern languages.

On Tue, 22 Jan 2013 20:38:29 +0100
"IanWizard" <1.am.w1z4rd@gmail.com> wrote:

> I keep hearing a lot of people saying that they think that D is a "niche" language.  Did I completely miss something, or are they just misinformed?  I've never thought of D as a niche language. I consider (and use) it as what Cpp should have been.  Like a love child from C, C++, and Python.  I'd be very interested to hear others thoughts on the subject, as well as other common misconceptions.

D is a general-purpose language, so when people call it "niche" I suspect they're simply referring to D's user base currently being much smaller than C/C++/Java/Python/etc. The "niche" of D users.

OTOH, D can be (and often is) very accurately described as a reimagined, cleaned-up C++, so maybe their line of thinking is "Ok, so it's for C++ users that are unhappy with C++", which might a niche *if* that were *all* D was well suited for.

On Tuesday, January 22, 2013 16:16:33 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> D is a general-purpose language, so when people call it "niche" I suspect they're simply referring to D's user base currently being much smaller than C/C++/Java/Python/etc. The "niche" of D users.

Exactly. Regardless of how good D is, its user base is still relatively small - especially in industry. I'd fully expect that anyone specifically looking for a job programming in D would have a very hard time of it. They exist, but they're not common.

But the user base is growing, so D may yet become a mainstream programming language like we'd like it to. Plenty of other programming languages have taken a while to really catch on (e.g. Python).

- Jonathan M Davis