The angry emo D rant | Hacker News Reader

The angry emo D rant

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27 pointsslig11 comments

Users normally aren’t better, though. They try the language and expect everything to be rock solid – this has been since the beginning of D. So they play with it, decide it’s not ready yet and leave for other pastures.

Can you blame them? Everyone has real work that they need to do. Languages like Haskell and OCaml may be lacking in bread-and-butter libraries, but their toolchains are pretty solid, GHC is a fantastic compiler. The language landscape is brutally competitive; for any language to survive the pain of learning it has to be rewarded with a big boost in productivity (or salary...).

It's an interesting comparison, since Haskell is about 20 years old and D is about 10. I remember using Haskell about 10 years ago, and it was a rocky experience.

Back then Haskell was mired in "avoid success at all costs" - AFAIK D isn't a research language, it was always targeted towards production use.

I think that's actually the point of the article, that D while theoretically a nice language is in practice crippled by being terrible to actually work with.

I admit that I went a bit overboard with the complaints about users, as seen in the out of context quote ;) This was mostly to accentuate that the few folks doing anything about D were (and still are) being ignored or actively bashed by the people in charge.

Regardless of any technical issues, that cultural issue would be enough to put me off. Sometimes it is the case that the language's maker's interests diverge from that of its users (e.g. OCaml is developed by language researchers without direct commercial interests) but it's rare to see them poisoning their own ecosystem.

In the early days D seemed like a real good idea as a cleanup replacement for C++ with potential to innovate in some areas such as the multi core revolution.

The developers started off with something that was compatible with C in the same way C++ was but couldn't make up there mind whether they would like to depart or maintain that relationship. Then they kept adding increasingly more features/complexity and a lot of the decisions were pressured and rushed out the door by Andrei Alexandrescu so he could meet the deadlines for the book everyone had preordered. Eventually D was left as a language that had no idea what it was trying to be.

The site seems to be down, or is it just me?

For me too, here's the google cache http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3-yV7X4...

Sorry about that, looks like the VPS can't stand about any pressure :<

Changed the host, should be fine now.

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