Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

Not different enough to be worth switching from Java/C++ with their much bigger and more established communities. This was especially true earlier in it's history when it required GC. Now it doesn't, but it has to compete with Rust which can also offer memory safety.

View on HN

Funkwerk, one of the first companies to adopt D back in 2008, switched their passenger information system from Java and C++ to D. They weren't just on the look out for something different. They had a real problem to solve, tried out a few languages, and settled on D. They're still using it today (they moved from D1 to D2). And if you're riding certain rail networks in Europe, you're benefiting from it.

https://dlang.org/blog/2017/07/28/project-highlight-funkwerk...

> Not different enough to be worth switching from Java/C++ with their much bigger and more established communities.

Companies using Java or C++ don't switch because a language is "sufficiently different". I've been involved in programming language discussions for decades and I've never heard of a company switching to a language because it was different from what they were already using, though being too different is a common reason for not switching.

{For those not aware, D has intentionally kept compatibility with C as a priority, to the point that you can set a compiler flag and restrict yourself to "betterC". You can translate C code to D without making many changes to it.}

The D compiler speaks C11 now, it'll be ready for prime time in two or three releases based on speaking to Iain and Walter.

Just added C11 anonymous structs last night!

I saw, as long as the code stays clean I think we're going to be kicking ourselves this only happened now.

So far, it's shaping up nicely. I am indeed kicking myself for not doing it a while ago, but I'm a better programmer now than then, and it's going to be a better job.

"Different" is not a reason to switch, but "not different enough" is a reason not to switch.

When switching is costly, the potential upside must be big. When the other language seems similar, the upside also seems limited. When there are few differences, you can rationalize staying with the old language, because it may catch up with the features, or you can emulate the missing features, or just live without them, if the differences are small.

This is getting into a fuzzy area where one person's big difference is another person's small difference. I'd consider D templates to be a small difference from C++ templates in terms of the language[1] but big enough in terms of productivity that it would make sense to start a new project in D over C++ for that reason alone.

[1] A random commenter on HN might well conclude that there's no benefit to D's templates without using them.

But Go came and succeeded. Would you attritube this to Google's marketing, products like Docker/Kubernetes, or the simplicity of the language? Maybe something else?

Google's marketing, products like Docker/Kubernetes, and worshiping of UNIX key figures.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com