I personally can't use any other system programming language due to the expressiveness and familiarity of D. Its familiar and some syntactic expressiveness are just hard to get in other systems languages...feels easier to model code in D.

I don't use D primarily for work (Node.Js due to packages and cloud support...web services), but D is my go-to system language. Personally, wished I could use D for everything.

I like the community here better, I like the engagement and support. Yeah, it's not perfect but way better than anywhere else I've been.

What are you?

On Wednesday, 3 June 2020 at 11:12:08 UTC, aberba wrote:

> What are you?

Oops, what about you?

On Wednesday, 3 June 2020 at 11:12:08 UTC, aberba wrote:
> I personally can't use any other system programming language due to the expressiveness and familiarity of D. Its familiar and some syntactic expressiveness are just hard to get in other systems languages...feels easier to model code in D.
>
> I don't use D primarily for work (Node.Js due to packages and cloud support...web services), but D is my go-to system language. Personally, wished I could use D for everything.
>
> I like the community here better, I like the engagement and support. Yeah, it's not perfect but way better than anywhere else I've been.
>
> What are you?

I can't stand C/C++ and my programming projects revolve around game development, so D is a good fit here. Whenever I tried some alternative like C#, Kotlin, Java, I find myself going back to D, because I am missing some feature or it's harder to do C interop. A possible alternative for me would be Rust, but I am not a fan of its syntax and design choices (I don't really care much about memory safety and I am a hardcore OOP fan).

For web stuff I use Dart instead of JS, because I can't stand JS. I also wish I could use D for web stuff, but we're not there yet (I know betterC works for WebAssembly, but betterC feels too limiting for me).

On Wednesday, 3 June 2020 at 11:12:08 UTC, aberba wrote:
>
> What are you?

It has been the case that my best _products_ happen to be done with D, so I haven't looked elsewhere. It's the language that let me think about the outcome the most, not sure if it make sense.

On Wednesday, 3 June 2020 at 11:12:08 UTC, aberba wrote:
> I personally can't use any other system programming language due to the expressiveness and familiarity of D. Its familiar and some syntactic expressiveness are just hard to get in other systems languages...feels easier to model code in D.
>
> I don't use D primarily for work (Node.Js due to packages and cloud support...web services), but D is my go-to system language. Personally, wished I could use D for everything.
>
> I like the community here better, I like the engagement and support. Yeah, it's not perfect but way better than anywhere else I've been.
>
> What are you?

I'd love to use D at work for writing microservices and other backend code, but thus far I haven't been able to get my boss to agree (the main sticking point being a lack of a good OpenAPI library). The most I've used it at work is for writing scripts to parse different kinds of files.

Of course all my hobby projects are in D. I agree that it's hard to use any other language once you get comfortable with it (though I've been using Groovy at work and like that language a lot). I dropped C++ years ago and never looked back.

D is the one language that I rarely feel like I am fighting it; there's the least barrier between brain and computer and when the language does get in the middle it generally actually helps prevent mistakes.

Using other langs I just feel like I'm wasting time fighting it instead of getting work done.

On Wednesday, 3 June 2020 at 11:12:08 UTC, aberba wrote:
>
> What are you?

Why do I continue to use D?  Many reasons but two biggies:

1) D enables a significantly better speed/complexity ratio than my previous language choice, C++.  I'm hoping that dcompute will likewise displace CUDA for future GPU projects.  (not a SycL fan)

2) The D community appears to be both game and able.  I look forward to pitching in once I've gained more experience.

On Wed, Jun 03, 2020 at 03:27:12PM +0000, Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> D is the one language that I rarely feel like I am fighting it; there's the least barrier between brain and computer and when the language does get in the middle it generally actually helps prevent mistakes.
> 
> Using other langs I just feel like I'm wasting time fighting it instead of getting work done.

+1. For me, D is the closest to the "ideal language" in my mind. It's not perfect, for sure, and there are dark corners that I generally avoid, but it's a lot closer than any other language I know of.

And yeah, like Adam, I find that with D, I'm generally focusing my attention more on solving the problem domain rather than fighting the language.  With other languages, I find that I'm constantly spending time fighting the language instead of making progress in the problem domain.

With C, I'm constantly spelling out low-level operations and manually managing error codes and worrying about memory management. Maybe about 5% of the actual mental effort is spent in the problem domain, the rest is spent explaining myself in excruciating detail to a machine that simply doesn't understand what I'm trying to do.

With C++ the abstraction level is somewhat better but I'm constantly fighting with obscure language semantics and the pathological syntax. Not to mention *avoiding* the hundred obvious ways to write code, which is almost always the wrong way, that will blow up in horrible ways.

With Java, I find myself with my hands tied behind my back and the simplest of tasks requires declaring 5 helper classes, 3 wrapper classes, 2 interfaces, and excessively-long identifiers just to do something I could express in 3 lines of D.  I find myself spending more time manipulating baroque language constructs and writing boilerplate than actually making progress in the problem domain.

With scripting languages, performance is often subpar and the lack of static typing a prime source of human errors which are hard to debug, because you can never be absolutely sure what the real type of something is, or whether you're accessing it in the wrong way.  I used to be a fan of Perl, but its weird and inconsistent syntax (this was Perl 5, BTW, never bothered to try Perl 6) makes it non-scalable to non-trivial projects.  And besides, I find that D is generally expressive enough to fill most of my scripting needs anyway, so I find myself reaching for D instead of other scripting languages these days.  For very small scripts I just use shell scripting because of convenience; but anything that requires actual computation (like manipulating lists or doing non-trivial things with strings) D is definitely the go-to solution. Plus, with D, you can easily expand what's initially a throwaway script into something much bigger without having to reengineer the whole thing from scratch.


T

-- 
A programming language should be a toolbox for the programmer to draw upon, not a minefield of dangerous explosives that you have to very carefully avoid touching in the wrong way.

On Wednesday, 3 June 2020 at 11:12:08 UTC, aberba wrote:
> I personally can't use any other system programming language due to the expressiveness and familiarity of D. Its familiar and some syntactic expressiveness are just hard to get in other systems languages...feels easier to model code in D.
>
> I don't use D primarily for work (Node.Js due to packages and cloud support...web services), but D is my go-to system language. Personally, wished I could use D for everything.
>
> I like the community here better, I like the engagement and support. Yeah, it's not perfect but way better than anywhere else I've been.
>
> What are you?

I'm a few years into my project and I can't be bothered to rewrite it in Haskell.

On Wednesday, 3 June 2020 at 11:14:13 UTC, aberba wrote:
>
> Oops, what about you?

As a PhD Student I do lot of coding in Python. We use it (and other languages) to generate high performant C/C++ code.

Why am I curious about D and like working with it?
1) Using Python and other dynamic typed languages makes me forget how to program with statically typed languages. I don't like being tied up to only functional (Haskell), to weird templates (C++) or to the JVM (Kotlin). Go doesn't have the expressiveness and I haven't really tried Rust, but I suspect the same.

2) I think D's motto "write fast, read fast, run fast" describes the language pretty well. The syntax is nice. Once you understood "you want to use structs" and "ranges are cool" it really is nice to look at.

3) D's compile time capabilities are fantastic (CTFE, Templates)

4) Community. Lot's of nice and most notably competent people here.

5) I hope to get rid of Python -> C++ some day.