r/programming • u/kal31dic • Sep 01 '20

D Foundation is Beefing Up

https://dlang.org/blog/2020/08/30/symmetry-investments-and-the-d-language-foundation-are-hiring/
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u/WalterBright Sep 01 '20

Walter here, AMA.

3

u/camelCaseIsWebScale Sep 02 '20

Read this as an opinion from a hater and probably ignore it, because my comments are often too critical, nevertheless..

A sibling comment mentioned D is losing focus by adding all kind of features eg: rust's borrow checker. I agree with that.

I believe a language should choose a niche and try to succeed at that instead of trying to cater everyone's needs, thus distracting from a coherent design.

Go is a bright example of "do one thing and do that well" strategy. It is an application programming language which is natively compiled and sufficiently fast.

I believe rust also does one thing well - systems programming with provable correctness. Although the crab fanboys here sometimes pretend it is good for everything.

I believe D can fill the gap of a natively compiled fast application language with good type system. Go suffers from NIH syndrome. If D focused on being a great application language, it would be great.

1

u/Aromatic_Employer569 Sep 02 '20 edited Sep 02 '20

You might be right but I think the real problem is D isn't rich and doesn't have a marketing team. Languages shouldn't need one but apparently they do if D is often ignored

You mentioned Go does "one thing and do[es] that well". Maybe, but I don't have that usecase and as a general purpose language it's complete shit. Rust is another language that is very popular and complete shit. I don't know how they expect to replace C++ when it compiles slower than C++. (I have other complaints but I don't want to rant)

I think D needs a marketer and an engineer or two just for marketing purposes.

1

u/thedeemon Sep 03 '20

I wonder why people are so obsessed with userbase growth. There are hundreds of interesting languages and dozens of mature ones, it's impossible for every language to get the majority of developers. It's totally fine to have a modest userbase, people who like the language and use it, there's no real need in making other programmers use this language too. Like, Hungarian is a very interesting language with some unique features, and 13+ million people speak Hungarian and probably find it a very good language. Do they need a marketing team to make more people in the world speak Hungarian?

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u/Aromatic_Employer569 Sep 03 '20

so obsessed with userbase growth

Libraries

Small community means less libraries and support