
Everyone really likes D now, How come? - jollydev
https://medium.com/zeduhow/everyone-likes-the-d-everyone-eee3c19c3af9
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philwelch
The provided article:

* Does not explain why "everyone really likes D now"

* Provides no evidence that "everyone really likes D now"

* Doesn't have the title of the submission (though, to be fair, the actual title is a vaguely similar rude joke that you can probably infer).

* _Does_ give actionable advice about how to start programming in D, if you wanted to do that.

I guess my big, unanswered question is: what does D have over all the newer
and more popular compiled languages out there that seem to occupy overlapping
niches, like Go, Swift, Kotlin, and Rust? Or, for that matter, the older
standbys of C, C++, Java, and C#? And if that seems like a wide spread, the
obvious follow-up is: where in this space does D live? It's object-oriented
(like C++, Java, C#, Kotlin, and Swift) and "makes memory access available"
(like C, C++, and Rust), but that's all I can tell.

~~~
scrumper
> * Provides no evidence...

I'd go further and say it provides the opposite - it shows a low and declining
search trend.

The rest of it is a fairly sloppy guide on how to set up Atom for D
development.

Seems to have been written just to have an excuse to make that puerile joke.

~~~
geezerjay
> I'd go further and say it provides the opposite - it shows a low and
> declining search trend.

This.

Additionally, the only moment in time when D was a reasonable concept was
before C++11, when the development of C++ was stalled and there were a few
pain points with C++98 that justified picking up other tools.

Since then C++ started evolving and a majority of those pain points were
addressed, thus leaving D without any major selling point or even purpose.

To make matters worse, with the whole industry shift to the web C+ has since
seen a decline in market share. Therefore D is placed as a poor replacement
for the incumbent of a market share in decline.

~~~
philwelch
> Additionally, the only moment in time when D was a reasonable concept was
> before C++11, when the development of C++ was stalled and there were a few
> pain points with C++98 that justified picking up other tools.

I don't know enough about D to dispute this, but in a backhanded way, this is
a pretty damning appraisal of D. It's not just the "industry shift to the web"
that has led to the decline of C++. Why do people write server-side
applications in Java or Go instead of C++? Why do people write mobile apps in
Objective-C, Java, or Swift instead of C++? Even in the remaining domain of
desktop applications and systems code, C++ isn't necessarily the go-to choice
anymore.

And so, if D doesn't offer anything over C++ that couldn't be addressed by
bolting even more features onto C++, why the heck does it exist?

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axaxs
Title is misleading and doesn't match the headline. Shame because I thought it
meant D was gaining steam, whereas it shows near the opposite.

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kmbriedis
The name of the language and this title sound so wrong... Never ever name
something D

Many years ago while being too naïve I created a website d-something and the
name was big problem, now I see why

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sametmax
100% genuine question: why would somebody learn D over rust/go/erlang
(depending of your specific projects) ?

~~~
asow92
It feels like Java and acts like C. It almost feels like what Objective C
should have been.

~~~
axaxs
This comment is funny to me as it shows how different programmers tastes are.
Some would say that is the worst of both worlds.

~~~
mhh__
You can write pure functional code in D, if that floats your boat.

~~~
liveoneggs
D grew pattern matching and guards? (multi-funcs/etc)

~~~
mhh__
If you so choose to D can have a relatively clean library implementation. The
type inference isn't bidirectional (Or at least it pales in comparison to HM)
so it wouldn't be as good as ML-like FP.

Pattern matching is a feature of pure functional code rather than a
requirement (As useful as it is, every time I touch haskell for fun I always
miss the mathematical approach to coding when I then write in C-land).

Enforced purity is a feature, however. That's what I was referring to.
However, ..., there is no pure-IO so it would be like Haskell before Monadic
IO was figured out (I assume).

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mbrodersen
Almost nobody "really likes D now". It is a failed language in the sense that
it never managed to become mainstream or attract a large following.

