
The Next Big Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of - Libertatea
http://www.wired.com/2014/07/d-programming-language/
======
PaulRobinson
Wired don't really understand programming, which is ironic.

D is I think something well discussed here.

For the first time in about a decade - possibly two decades - there is a
renaissance in programming language design focused on approaching real-World
problems. D is a piece of the puzzle, but I think Wired don't quite get yet
that it is now the entire solution.

~~~
Jach
The author isn't a programmer, and as I read more it became clear the audience
isn't practicing programmers. (In other words I don't think this is HN
material.) I'm not sure who the audience is supposed to be, though. I'm left
with the sense that it's the non-technical manager of the programming team,
and the article provides a justification for them to force D on the next
project.

------
yarper
I'm not sure most people on HN will have "Never Heard Of" D. It has 10,000
downloads a month!

~~~
VLM
Wired's target audience is not in tech. There are other analogies in the mass
(and not so mass) media. Wired articles don't really belong on HN as a class,
although individual topics can be relevant if sometimes inaccurately reported
or late news.

A podcasting example is "this week in tech" is for people outside tech to
glance inside. Its moderately entertaining and nicely produced although I'd
worry about my personal abilities if I ever learned anything from it, because
its not aimed at a tech audience. Podcasts for people in tech to listen to are
things like "Software engineering radio" although they sometimes run off the
TPS report deep end of fads, or "functional geekery", or the former Relevance,
now Cognitech, interview show. "FLOSS weekly", another interview podcast show,
is kind of in between the two worlds, which is pretty unusual and interesting.

Edited to add some magazine examples. PC magazine is not for people inside
tech to read, its for people outside tech wondering whats going on to hear a
little gossip. The former sysadmin magazine (out of print for like a decade
now?) was for people inside tech to read. The dear departed Perl Journal was
for people inside tech. The print version of Linux Journal a decade or so ago
was unusually more or less on the border. For noobs, magazines were kind of
like internet websites printed out and mailed to you. Different from
newspapers in that you only got one a month and they were somewhat more
polished and edited and generally on nicer paper. My kids are young enough to
not really understand newspapers or magazines so I've actually had discussions
along these lines trying to explain. They're a little fuzzy about broadcast
distribution vs streaming too, broadcast is like a stream but you have no
personal pause or commercial skip button, this confuses the heck out of them.

------
joeblau
Well outside of the link bait title, I've heard of D. I don't think it's going
to be the next big language if you can't write a mobile application or a cloud
backend with it. Sure it may be more efficient, but Android devices run Java
and iOS devices run C/C++/Objective-C/Swift. On the backend, you've got other
languages and technologies that more common that have a better chance of
making it than D.

~~~
Cyther606
Android Studio will soon feature NDK integration. You can reuse C/C++ code on
Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS, achieving native performance everywhere, and then
use the recommended GUI toolkit on each platform [i].

However, C/C++ is intimidating, which is why I think compile-to-C programming
languages like Nimrod [ii] are going to be the next big thing.

[i] [https://gradha.github.io/articles/2014/03/nimrod-for-
cross-p...](https://gradha.github.io/articles/2014/03/nimrod-for-cross-
platform-software.html)

[ii] [http://picheta.me/articles/2013/10/about-nimrods-
features.ht...](http://picheta.me/articles/2013/10/about-nimrods-
features.html)

------
Sonicmouse
Article lost me here:

"But [C++ is] not as easy to use as languages like Python, Ruby, and PHP. In
other words, it doesn’t let coders build software as quickly."

Anyone who is proficient in C++ can write code just as quickly if not faster
than most other languages.

It's like saying knowing Spanish is better than knowing German because you can
communicate faster in Spanish. It's an insult to the German language.

~~~
mynegation
I can offer anecdotal evidence to the contrary. I am proficient in both C++
and Python and I am able to whip up something in Python much faster than in
C++. Boost and C++11 closed the gap somewhat but the difference is:

* Python's approach of "batteries included", ruch standard library. Sure you can find a library in C++ for almost everything, but it is never as easy as "pip install" and subsequent import. * I do not have to declare types. It works well for small programs where I can maintain implicit typing in my head but becomes an impediment for larger programs. * Compilation time for any moderately sized C++ program and the lack of REPL quickly become a problem in fast iteration cycle. No IPython for C++. * Small syntactic sugar things always help. As an example, In Python I can assign array, set, or dict literal to any variable. In C++11 even though I should supposedly be able to do some of that, it is not universally across platforms.

------
swah
Related:
[https://www.google.com.br/search?q=next+big+language](https://www.google.com.br/search?q=next+big+language)

------
skizm
Is Rust supposed to have a similar goals to D? Seems like a lot of
(relatively) new languages are setting out to achieve c/c++ performance while
having easier to understand/more expressive syntax.

~~~
steveklabnik
Vaguely, yes. It's been a few years since I've written any D, but the initial
impetus for the language was "Fix the broken aspects of C++." Rust's core
concept is "memory safety with zero overhead."

This means they end up in very similar, yet different places: GC is the
default in D, but isn't even a core part of Rust at all. D allows you to turn
it off, losing some functionality, Rust allows you to add one in as a library.

Most people in Rust-land have an incredibly high amount of respect for the D
team and all they've done, and continue to do.

~~~
steveklabnik
Walter is answering questions on this article over on proggit:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2a20h5/wired_ma...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2a20h5/wired_magazine_discovers_d/ciqq60v)

    
    
        >  What goals did you aim to achieve with D?
        > 
        > I wanted to create a language that was both fast and easy
        > to use.

------
Cyther606
I was hoping this would be about Nimrod.

\- Pythonic syntax with static typing

\- Compiles to C, C++, Obj-C and JS

\- Produces small executables without dependencies

\- Performs comparably to C

\- Docs and community need to grow

