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digitalmars.D - Should I invest time in D?

reply Lars Johansson <lasse 11dim.se> writes:
After years of procrastination, I at the end of last year 
finalized Rey Valesa's great dlang/vibe tutorial   
https://forum.dlang.org/thread/gnluupbilugncznkffuo forum.dlang.org.
I had planned to proceed with a deep dive into D.

With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has opened.
I do not want to be a part of such community and the future of D 
does not look good. The alternatives do not look good either. 
Immature, boring, too restrictive etc. Is assembler the choice if 
you want to add a low level language to your Intel toolbox?
I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  I 
have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 'Why 
should I use D?'. I am greatful for any polite answer:)
Jan 16
next sibling parent Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com> writes:
On 1/16/2024 11:19 PM, Lars Johansson wrote:

 With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has opened.
 I do not want to be a part of such community and the future of D does not look 
 good. The alternatives do not look good either. Immature, boring, too 
 restrictive etc. Is assembler the choice if you want to add a low level
language 
 to your Intel toolbox?
 I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  I have 
 procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 'Why should I use D?'.
I 
 am greatful for any polite answer:)


Think of it this way. The reason our community argues so passionately is
because 
we all love D and want it to succeed.

If we didn't care, that wouldn't happen.

Or, to put it another way, it takes the fires of Mt Doom to forge the one ring!
Jan 16
prev sibling next sibling parent Abdulhaq <alynch4048 gmail.com> writes:
On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:

 After years of procrastination, I at the end of last year 
 finalized Rey Valesa's great dlang/vibe tutorial   
 https://forum.dlang.org/thread/gnluupbilugncznkffuo forum.dlang.org.
 I had planned to proceed with a deep dive into D.

 With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has 
 opened.
 I do not want to be a part of such community and the future of 
 D does not look good. The alternatives do not look good either. 
 Immature, boring, too restrictive etc. Is assembler the choice 
 if you want to add a low level language to your Intel toolbox?
 I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  I 
 have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 
 'Why should I use D?'. I am greatful for any polite answer:)


Jump in and use D, trust your own opinion, and have fun. There's 
plenty of helpful members in the forums, ignore the impolite 
commenters.
Jan 17
prev sibling next sibling parent evilrat <evilrat666 gmail.com> writes:
On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:

 With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has 
 opened.
 I do not want to be a part of such community and the future of 
 D does not look good.


Just ignore this, you don't need to participate in community life 
at all.
What's happening right now is just some guys got upset and they 
decided that they can do better.
Ok, let them enjoy their new business then.

The D won't fade away just because of that anytime soon.

The only bad thing is that some of them started to throw insults 
out of nowhere.
This is the only WTF moment for me, because D community is one of 
the nicest overall, and why some people just suddenly started to 
behave so aggressive is a mystery for me.

I mean sure if I would be a yesterday contributor and realized 
that I wasted so much time for work that constantly got rejected 
I will be very upset, but just because of that yell at people and 
throw a tantrums? Oof.


 The alternatives do not look good either. Immature, boring, too 
 restrictive etc. Is assembler the choice if you want to add a 
 low level language to your Intel toolbox?
 I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  I 
 have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 
 'Why should I use D?'.


So, why should anyone use a programming language at all?
I mean I do use C++ but not because I want to...
I definitely doesn't want to use rust or go, at least I can work 

even though it is probably no longer locked in on one paradigm.

Yet I have a programming job and a hobby too, and that's why I 
use D, it may have lacking features where practically every other 
language have them (string interpolation), it may have lack top 
class tooling, it may have rough edges and virtually non-working 
features (real DLL support on Windows), but it gives me the tools 
I need for practically any task without being locked in any of 
the "zen"/"philosophy"/paradigm or whatever.

Sure there is another missing piece about WASM support and people 
make their own runtimes, there seems to be complete lack of 
cooperation and the language core team doesn't seem to care much 
about that as well (I may be wrong though), but again, it doesn't 
mean that D isn't capable to do it.

Now the real D curse is lack of cooperation, everyone work for 
themselves, you can see that by amount of dub packages doing 
exact same stuff but differently, multiple WASM/minimal runtimes, 
and even that "We fork D" party doing just that in the end.

That of course won't answer your question or concerns, but the 
point is simple - if you enjoy D just use it and ignore all the 
noise, it is your life after all.
Jan 17
prev sibling next sibling parent bachmeier <no spam.net> writes:
On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:

 After years of procrastination, I at the end of last year 
 finalized Rey Valesa's great dlang/vibe tutorial   
 https://forum.dlang.org/thread/gnluupbilugncznkffuo forum.dlang.org.
 I had planned to proceed with a deep dive into D.


Great. If the language in that tutorial looked like something you 
want to use, then you should proceed with your deep dive.


 With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has 
 opened.
 I do not want to be a part of such community


Unless you replace Walter, you're probably not going to have 
people complaining about you. The community here is generally 
quite friendly. You can use the language without knowing anything 
about how it's developed. They just happen to have everything out 
in the open here, and anyone can participate, so you can see the 
sausage being made and make some of the sausage. Stick to Learn 
and Announce if you don't want to follow development discussions.


  and the future of D does not look good.


These discussions have been about changes to the language. The 
future of D is fine. Worst case scenario, there'll be new 
releases of the compiler every couple years, and there will only 
be a few new features. The language in its current form isn't 
going anywhere.


 I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  I 
 have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 
 'Why should I use D?'. I am greatful for any polite answer:)


Don't procrastinate further. Give it a try and see if you like it.
Jan 17
prev sibling next sibling parent matheus <matheus gmail.com> writes:
On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:

 ...


I don't get, asking this on D Forums I think will be very biased, 
and most answers will be positively to go for it.

By the way this is not a new language, it was forked before 
(Amber) and here we are, and about the other Fork, I don't think 
it will change most features in one go, it will take some time 
and you can evaluate the progress.

Since said you're a procrastinator yourself, maybe you're using 
this a excuse to not dive in?  =]

Go ahead look over it, if you change mind, most aspects of it 
will be useful later, for example I use D as C on steroids, but 
lately I decided to go and take a look over the features, 
learning new things is nice.

Matheus.
Jan 17
prev sibling next sibling parent Steven Schveighoffer <schveiguy gmail.com> writes:
On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:

 After years of procrastination, I at the end of last year 
 finalized Rey Valesa's great dlang/vibe tutorial   
 https://forum.dlang.org/thread/gnluupbilugncznkffuo forum.dlang.org.
 I had planned to proceed with a deep dive into D.

 With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has 
 opened.
 I do not want to be a part of such community and the future of 
 D does not look good. The alternatives do not look good either.


D should be fine, companies have invested lots of time and effort 
into using and supporting D, it's not going anywhere.

If you were to invest time in the fork, that has a more 
questionable future.

The community is very good with people learning or using D. 
Peruse the learn forum, you'll see people answering questions all 
the time. We also have a discord server, where people get answers 
sometimes instantly (depending on time zone).

These forum arguments are all over making significant changes to 
the language, and leadership disagreements. And it's tainted with 
a certain element of bitterness from the people who have forked. 
Obviously, they want to announce that they made the right choice, 
but I think the way to do that is to make their fork into a 
useful thing, not to post diatribes here. That bitterness will 
eventually fizzle out, and they will succeed or fail on their own.


 Immature, boring, too restrictive etc. Is assembler the choice 
 if you want to add a low level language to your Intel toolbox?


I don't think any of those descriptors are appropriate to D. It 
was created in 2000, I think, so it's not immature (I've been 
using it on and off in a professional setting since 2007). 
Boring? I guess if you get excited only by writing boilerplate, 
it's boring ;)

Restrictive? If anything D is dinged for trying to be everything 
at once!

Oh, and D has inline assembler too, so you are covered there!


 I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  I 
 have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 
 'Why should I use D?'. I am greatful for any polite answer:)


Roughly speaking, D is a language that can do every bit of 
everything. It can be used at a high level, or low level, it has 
every paradigm you can think of, save functional programming (but 
it does have a smidge of that as well). Have a place where you 

fit in all those places instead. The one place where it's not 
there yet is WASM. Though it shines as a web server (vibe being a 
prime example).

And it's insanely addictive. Once you start using some of the 
features that D has, you will be ruined for other languages. So 
I'd say yes, give it a try. What's the worst that happens?

-Steve
Jan 17
prev sibling next sibling parent monkyyy <crazymonkyyy gmail.com> writes:
On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:

 After years of procrastination, I at the end of last year 
 finalized Rey Valesa's great dlang/vibe tutorial   
 https://forum.dlang.org/thread/gnluupbilugncznkffuo forum.dlang.org.
 I had planned to proceed with a deep dive into D.

 With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has 
 opened.
 I do not want to be a part of such community and the future of 
 D does not look good. The alternatives do not look good either. 
 Immature, boring, too restrictive etc. Is assembler the choice 
 if you want to add a low level language to your Intel toolbox?
 I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  I 
 have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 
 'Why should I use D?'. I am greatful for any polite answer:)


The drama aint new, the drama is a constant continuation and the 
people here either are extremely (pathologically) patient or 
combative and doing their own thing anyway.

D is a c++ compeditor, ignore any delusions about c; when you 
look at d templates versus c++ or rust, d's are better clearer, 
and compile faster, if nothing else d should help you learn 
templates. If you're looking for a templating language, d is the 
answer.
Jan 17
prev sibling next sibling parent reply Renato <renato athaydes.com> writes:
On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:

 After years of procrastination, I at the end of last year 
 finalized Rey Valesa's great dlang/vibe tutorial   
 https://forum.dlang.org/thread/gnluupbilugncznkffuo forum.dlang.org.
 I had planned to proceed with a deep dive into D.

 With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has 
 opened.
 I do not want to be a part of such community and the future of 
 D does not look good. The alternatives do not look good either. 
 Immature, boring, too restrictive etc. Is assembler the choice 
 if you want to add a low level language to your Intel toolbox?
 I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  I 
 have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 
 'Why should I use D?'. I am greatful for any polite answer:)


I've just started using D myself... so I can perhaps give a 
perspective from someone coming from a similar position.

D has a lot of depth. Initially, it looked like Java with 
pointers to me, but as I learned more about it, I saw a lot of 
stuff I had totally not anticipated, e.g. the metaprogramming 
which is just about as powerful as in Zig, though everyone acts 
like Zig invented it. But to fully understand the features, just 
going through the D Tour is not enough (though it's a really good 
start!)... you really need to write some stuff in it and see how 
it feels.

About the polemic going on in the community: I am completely 
ignoring that. Every language that allows passionate people to 
participate in the language development ends up with the exact 
same thing. Have you seen the sh*thow going on in the Rust 
community (people being invited to conferences then being 
cancelled at the last minute, their Foundation trying to 
copyright the use of the name Rust, some of the core developers 
resigning publicly over some power play... the list goes on)?

Have you read blog posts about disgruntled developers spending 
decades on Scala and then finally leaving with a big rant (it was 
a running joke for a while that you must rage quit with a huge 
blog post if you're a real Scala dev)?? Apparently that has 
happened almost exactly the same in D (I've been reading too many 
thread here lately!). This is just how developers are (perhaps 
more than the general population) - they want to be heard, and if 
they're not they feel like they're underappreciated, that their 
genius is not being recognized and that other people are fools 
for not seeing that...

Anyway, stay away from all that - it just doesn't matter when 
you're working on something cool using a language you enjoy.

The things I like in D:

* at least 3 different compilers. This is more important than 
people may realize!
* good, useful features.
* mature enough (though less than I expected from its 20-year 
history).
* simple to use (most of the time).
* compiles fast, runs fast (though [it can be slow 
too](https://forum.dlang.org/thread/bpcchllrascnjsrszheb forum.dlang.org) if
care is not taken, or super fast if you know what you're doing - see the linked
thread to the end).
*  nogc,  safe,  nothrow etc. the more the compiler can verify, 
the better!

Things I didn't really like much:

* package manger is good but almost completely undocumented (I 
already made PRs documenting the stuff I learned - hope they'll 
merge [the latest 
one](https://github.com/dlang/dub-docs/pull/84)).
* not very "search" friendly due to moderate popularity so not 
many questions with answers can be found.
* veteran users seem to love to complain about the language 
(regardless of the politics going on). That's a bad sign... Rust 
people rarely do that (except for the async debacle).
* testing is built-in (awesome!) but test reporting is terrible 
(though packages do exist to make it better - but again, 
difficult to find solutions).
* some constructs are very IDE-unfriendly (a downside of 
CTFE/metaprogramming stuff I think, Zig has similar 
"untyped"-looking - though actually typesafe - stuff).
* tooling seems subpar. VSCode is the only IDE that actually 
works well and I would've preferred to use emacs or Kate (which 
do work, but you have to suffer to  make it usable). Tried 
profiling and it was very underwhelming. Couldn't get debugging 
working yet.. but didn't try very hard.

I am not sure yet I'll stick with D, but after 3 or so weeks I am 
still here :D - tried Zig and Nim as well, and looked into Odin, 
but those are so immature it's definitely going to be years 
before they're generally usable... D is usable today. It's not 
perfect for sure, but it seems to be getting better, I just hope 
it doesn't get more "difficult" features and instead trims down a 
bit on the complex stuff (like all the subtle differences between 
pointers and `ref`, `in`, `out`, `inout`, `scope`, `const` and so 
on - that kind of stuff should be much simpler IMHO).

In conclusion: if you want a good low-level, mature language that 
has good tooling, I would go for Rust instead... but I don't like 
the slow compilation times and millions of dependencies for 
anything beyond hello world, so D is kind of a nice compromise 
for me :D no offence to anyone. It's not as fast, not as 
powerful... not as popular... not as safe even... but it's 
simpler to use and just feels more fun without being overly yolo 
like Nim, or completely raw like Zig and Odin! A good 
middleground I would say.
Jan 17
parent Don Allen <donaldcallen gmail.com> writes:
On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 17:34:14 UTC, Renato wrote:

 On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
 wrote:

 After years of procrastination, I at the end of last year 
 finalized Rey Valesa's great dlang/vibe tutorial   
 https://forum.dlang.org/thread/gnluupbilugncznkffuo forum.dlang.org.
 I had planned to proceed with a deep dive into D.

 With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has 
 opened.
 I do not want to be a part of such community and the future of 
 D does not look good. The alternatives do not look good 
 either. Immature, boring, too restrictive etc. Is assembler 
 the choice if you want to add a low level language to your 
 Intel toolbox?
 I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  
 I have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 
 'Why should I use D?'. I am greatful for any polite answer:)


 I've just started using D myself... so I can perhaps give a 
 perspective from someone coming from a similar position.

 D has a lot of depth. Initially, it looked like Java with 
 pointers to me, but as I learned more about it, I saw a lot of 
 stuff I had totally not anticipated, e.g. the metaprogramming 
 which is just about as powerful as in Zig, though everyone acts 
 like Zig invented it. But to fully understand the features, 
 just going through the D Tour is not enough (though it's a 
 really good start!)... you really need to write some stuff in 
 it and see how it feels.

 About the polemic going on in the community: I am completely 
 ignoring that. Every language that allows passionate people to 
 participate in the language development ends up with the exact 
 same thing. Have you seen the sh*thow going on in the Rust 
 community (people being invited to conferences then being 
 cancelled at the last minute, their Foundation trying to 
 copyright the use of the name Rust, some of the core developers 
 resigning publicly over some power play... the list goes on)?

 Have you read blog posts about disgruntled developers spending 
 decades on Scala and then finally leaving with a big rant (it 
 was a running joke for a while that you must rage quit with a 
 huge blog post if you're a real Scala dev)?? Apparently that 
 has happened almost exactly the same in D (I've been reading 
 too many thread here lately!). This is just how developers are 
 (perhaps more than the general population) - they want to be 
 heard, and if they're not they feel like they're 
 underappreciated, that their genius is not being recognized and 
 that other people are fools for not seeing that...

 Anyway, stay away from all that - it just doesn't matter when 
 you're working on something cool using a language you enjoy.

 The things I like in D:

 * at least 3 different compilers. This is more important than 
 people may realize!
 * good, useful features.
 * mature enough (though less than I expected from its 20-year 
 history).
 * simple to use (most of the time).
 * compiles fast, runs fast (though [it can be slow 
 too](https://forum.dlang.org/thread/bpcchllrascnjsrszheb forum.dlang.org) if
care is not taken, or super fast if you know what you're doing - see the linked
thread to the end).
 *  nogc,  safe,  nothrow etc. the more the compiler can verify, 
 the better!

 Things I didn't really like much:

 * package manger is good but almost completely undocumented (I 
 already made PRs documenting the stuff I learned - hope they'll 
 merge [the latest 
 one](https://github.com/dlang/dub-docs/pull/84)).
 * not very "search" friendly due to moderate popularity so not 
 many questions with answers can be found.
 * veteran users seem to love to complain about the language 
 (regardless of the politics going on). That's a bad sign... 
 Rust people rarely do that (except for the async debacle).
 * testing is built-in (awesome!) but test reporting is terrible 
 (though packages do exist to make it better - but again, 
 difficult to find solutions).
 * some constructs are very IDE-unfriendly (a downside of 
 CTFE/metaprogramming stuff I think, Zig has similar 
 "untyped"-looking - though actually typesafe - stuff).
 * tooling seems subpar. VSCode is the only IDE that actually 
 works well and I would've preferred to use emacs or Kate (which 
 do work, but you have to suffer to  make it usable). Tried 
 profiling and it was very underwhelming. Couldn't get debugging 
 working yet.. but didn't try very hard.

 I am not sure yet I'll stick with D, but after 3 or so weeks I 
 am still here :D - tried Zig and Nim as well, and looked into 
 Odin, but those are so immature it's definitely going to be 
 years before they're generally usable... D is usable today. 
 It's not perfect for sure, but it seems to be getting better, I 
 just hope it doesn't get more "difficult" features and instead 
 trims down a bit on the complex stuff (like all the subtle 
 differences between pointers and `ref`, `in`, `out`, `inout`, 
 `scope`, `const` and so on - that kind of stuff should be much 
 simpler IMHO).

 In conclusion: if you want a good low-level, mature language 
 that has good tooling, I would go for Rust instead... but I 
 don't like the slow compilation times and millions of 
 dependencies for anything beyond hello world, so D is kind of a 
 nice compromise for me :D no offence to anyone. It's not as 
 fast, not as powerful... not as popular... not as safe even... 
 but it's simpler to use and just feels more fun without being 
 overly yolo like Nim, or completely raw like Zig and Odin! A 
 good middleground I would say.


Excellent analysis. I've done the same language tour myself. I've 
written a fair amount of Rust, and concluded that it is the most 
difficult programming language to master that I've ever 
encountered, and I've been doing this a *very* long time. And I 
have a lot of Haskell experience. But once you find the Rust 
gotchas that get you into lifetime hell or a big fight with the 
borrow checker, it's excellent. Like Haskell, once you have the 
blessing of the compiler, your program will run. Not necessarily 
correctly, of course, but you won't need gdb to fix it. As you 
said, the tooling is good. I will comment that I really dislike 
much of the documentation, starting with the "affectionately 
named" (ugh) Book. The Jim Blandy book is orders of magnitude 
better. The library documentation is also not great, but it's 
usable.

Despite all the recent tearing of hair and rending of clothing, I 
think D is very, very good. What it offers that Rust does not is 
a strong connection to C and C++. So if you are experienced in 
those languages, you will feel comfortable in D pretty quickly. 
You also find that a lot of the many rough edges in both 
languages are gone. D also has valuable capabilities that C and 
C++ do not. The garbage collector is a big plus, in my opinion. 
Those who dismiss D because it has a GC don't know what they are 
talking about. D offers multiple memory-management techniques; 
using GC-managed storage is only one and can easily be avoided. 
Or minimized. But having it there can really simplify your 
programming life.

Another important aspect of D is the ability to use C libraries 
directly, without need for bindings. Much of the work I did in 
Rust involved gtk and the Rust gtk "crate" is hard to use and 
poorly documented. In D, you use gtk as you would in C. I did my 
D-gtk work before ImportC was available, so I wrote my own 
function prototypes for the gtk functions I use. While ImportC is 
very nice, one issue is that the C library headers tend to be 
sloppy about mutability. So if you care about not following their 
careless lead in the declaration of your own variables, use of 
ImportC can lead to a lot of casts, particularly of strings that 
are immutable but the C headers don't say so.

Your listing of the downsides of D is fair, I think. I've avoided 
using dub for precisely the reason you note -- the lack of 
documentation. The language reference is generally good, very 
thorough, but it is inaccurate in places. And at least in the 
past, I've felt that PRs about those problems don't get prompt 
attention (I haven't checked recently), probably one of the 
symptoms of the small D developer community. I do think Ali 
Çehreli's book is very good and getting better all the time.
Jan 17
prev sibling next sibling parent Binarydepth <binarydepth gmail.com> writes:
On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:

 After years of procrastination, I at the end of last year 
 finalized Rey Valesa's great dlang/vibe tutorial   
 https://forum.dlang.org/thread/gnluupbilugncznkffuo forum.dlang.org.
 I had planned to proceed with a deep dive into D.

 With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has 
 opened.
 I do not want to be a part of such community and the future of 
 D does not look good. The alternatives do not look good either. 
 Immature, boring, too restrictive etc. Is assembler the choice 
 if you want to add a low level language to your Intel toolbox?
 I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  I 
 have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 
 'Why should I use D?'. I am greatful for any polite answer:)


I vouch for friendly community in my limited sample of 
interactions though and a fork is not a bad thing. I came because 
I was curious about D's shape nowadays. I considered D in the 
past but went C++ even when my wish is D really.

I understand the higher value of your time and energy and 
certainly don't take it casually. There is an argument of fun of 
course and motivation too. My personal opinion is a programmer 
who is good is usually someone who likes problem solving (hence 
fun) but also has a motivation which is either money or some 
computing problem. Computing problems/applications have many 
branches for each specific case.

There are many aspects in development that need to be weighted 
too ad that is where the features of a programming language take 
hold. In some languages some things may even take 10 minutes 
while in the other language it takes 2 hours as an example and 
this is a huge thing for commercial software AKA Implementation 
costs.

But we cannot delve more into your decision until we know what 
are your motivations and also describe your concern beyond a 
metaphor of "Pandora's box". The question is, What is wrong with 
the Pandora box for you? Have you decided on a programming 
project already and what do you hope to achieve?
Jan 17
prev sibling next sibling parent Guillaume Piolat <first.name gmail.com> writes:
On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:

 I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  I 
 have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 
 'Why should I use D?'. I am greatful for any polite answer:)


Well using the language is a very different experience than 
reading the forums here, do don't worry too much about the 
shoutings and I'd say don't read the forums too often ^^. D the 
language is super "peaceful" to use.

There are systematic conflicts in language development that also 
happen to other communities, sometimes a bit worse maybe:
Ocaml: 
https://lobste.rs/s/atqtzp/introducing_opend_d_language_fork_is_open#c_oa2vwx
Clojure: 
https://lobste.rs/s/atqtzp/introducing_opend_d_language_fork_is_open#c_xqxeos

I think Learning D is very rewarding since it's it very 
"moldable", it adapts to any task and personally allows my best 
work to be produced.
Jan 17
prev sibling next sibling parent reply tony <tonytdominguez aol.com> writes:
On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:

 After years...


What do you plan to write that can't be done in Python/Ruby?
Jan 17
parent reply cc <cc nevernet.com> writes:
On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 01:18:00 UTC, tony wrote:

 On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
 wrote:

 After years...


 What do you plan to write that can't be done in Python/Ruby?


Something fun perhaps?😎

Seriously, the reason I use D is precisely because it meets that 
perfect peak intersection on the graph between powerful and 
genuinely fun/enjoyable to work with.  When I'm not doing 
commercial work in D, I have folder upon folder of little 
snippets and experiments I've done just to explore new ideas or 
try something entertaining or creative, because it's just that 
easy, and appealing, to jump right in and do it in D.  Other 
languages haven't inspired me to that degree, and I'm one that 
rode the perl wagon for long after it should have turned around 
and headed back to civilization.
Jan 18
parent "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh qfbox.info> writes:
On Thu, Jan 18, 2024 at 08:44:22PM +0000, cc via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]

 Seriously, the reason I use D is precisely because it meets that
 perfect peak intersection on the graph between powerful and genuinely
 fun/enjoyable to work with.  When I'm not doing commercial work in D,
 I have folder upon folder of little snippets and experiments I've done
 just to explore new ideas or try something entertaining or creative,
 because it's just that easy, and appealing, to jump right in and do it
 in D.  Other languages haven't inspired me to that degree, and I'm one
 that rode the perl wagon for long after it should have turned around
 and headed back to civilization.


LOL, I used to be on the Perl bandwagon too.

And then I discovered D, and now wouldn't want to write one more line of
Perl if I could help it.


T

-- 
Truth, Sir, is a cow which will give [skeptics] no more milk, and so they are
gone to milk the bull. -- Sam. Johnson
Jan 18
prev sibling next sibling parent reply Lars Johansson <lars 11dim.se> writes:
On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:

 After years of procrastination, I at the end of last year 
 finalized Rey Valesa's great dlang/vibe tutorial   
 https://forum.dlang.org/thread/gnluupbilugncznkffuo forum.dlang.org.
 I had planned to proceed with a deep dive into D.

 With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has 
 opened.
 I do not want to be a part of such community and the future of 
 D does not look good. The alternatives do not look good either. 
 Immature, boring, too restrictive etc. Is assembler the choice 
 if you want to add a low level language to your Intel toolbox?
 I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  I 
 have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 
 'Why should I use D?'. I am greatful for any polite answer:)


Thanks for all good answers.
There were some questions raised:

Why do you turn to this forum for opinions about D? - You show 
know D best. I guess I needed some moral support.

What are you going to do with D? - Mostly for fun.

I like coding.
In the distant pasts I did an awful lot of IBM assembler and that 
was fun. Since the early 90ties mostly hilvl languages and 
scripting. Now as retired I like to see if I’m still able to 
learn a new language.
The only language I looked at so far that looks appealing to me 
is D,  thou templates look a bit odd.
I suspect if I learn a lolvl language, I will come up with 
something useful.
I still do some $work (more than I like). So I’m not sure how 
much time I will spend on D. Anyhow I will give it a try.

Thank you again. I did not expect that many and nice responses.
Next time I write it will be in a beginner forum, not this one.
Jan 20
parent Binarydepth <binarydepth gmail.com> writes:
On Saturday, 20 January 2024 at 11:22:19 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:

 On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
 wrote:

 After years of procrastination, I at the end of last year 
 finalized Rey Valesa's great dlang/vibe tutorial   
 https://forum.dlang.org/thread/gnluupbilugncznkffuo forum.dlang.org.
 I had planned to proceed with a deep dive into D.

 With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has 
 opened.
 I do not want to be a part of such community and the future of 
 D does not look good. The alternatives do not look good 
 either. Immature, boring, too restrictive etc. Is assembler 
 the choice if you want to add a low level language to your 
 Intel toolbox?
 I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  
 I have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 
 'Why should I use D?'. I am greatful for any polite answer:)


 Thanks for all good answers.
 There were some questions raised:

 Why do you turn to this forum for opinions about D? - You show 
 know D best. I guess I needed some moral support.

 What are you going to do with D? - Mostly for fun.

 I like coding.
 In the distant pasts I did an awful lot of IBM assembler and 
 that was fun. Since the early 90ties mostly hilvl languages and 
 scripting. Now as retired I like to see if I’m still able to 
 learn a new language.
 The only language I looked at so far that looks appealing to me 
 is D,  thou templates look a bit odd.
 I suspect if I learn a lolvl language, I will come up with 
 something useful.
 I still do some $work (more than I like). So I’m not sure how 
 much time I will spend on D. Anyhow I will give it a try.

 Thank you again. I did not expect that many and nice responses.
 Next time I write it will be in a beginner forum, not this one.


That sounds good, yet you need to define your areas of 
development if you want to use existing libraries and want to 
avoid reinventing the wheel. Do you want to write programs for 
the terminal or scripts, applications, API's, libraries for other 
developers to use?

If it exclusively for fun, then I think you can consider 
competitive coding where you encounter teasers and improve over 
time and in the future decide some computational needs if you 
want.

There are many platforms for competitive coding like SPOJ but 
look as many sources as possible that have D also.
Jan 21
prev sibling next sibling parent Mengu <mengukagan gmail.com> writes:
On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:

 After years of procrastination, I at the end of last year 
 finalized Rey Valesa's great dlang/vibe tutorial   
 https://forum.dlang.org/thread/gnluupbilugncznkffuo forum.dlang.org.
 I had planned to proceed with a deep dive into D.

 With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has 
 opened.
 I do not want to be a part of such community and the future of 
 D does not look good. The alternatives do not look good either. 
 Immature, boring, too restrictive etc. Is assembler the choice 
 if you want to add a low level language to your Intel toolbox?
 I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  I 
 have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 
 'Why should I use D?'. I am greatful for any polite answer:)


The last D code that I had in production was deployed in 2017. 
I've maintained that for a while and then I've stopped using D in 
around 2020. I was never and still am not half as good as the 
rest of the people in this forum. Had this been 2018 and if you 
are a pragmatist and/or you don't like reinventing the wheel over 
and over again, I'd say D is not for you. Regardless of what went 
around, D has kept its integrity and its promise. More 
importantly, now it has a wider community, better tools, better 
ecosystem, I don't see any reason why D wouldn't be the tool 
you'd enjoy from now on.
Jan 26
prev sibling next sibling parent atzensepp <webwicht web.de> writes:
On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:

 After years of procrastination, I at the end of last year 
 finalized Rey Valesa's great dlang/vibe tutorial   
 https://forum.dlang.org/thread/gnluupbilugncznkffuo forum.dlang.org.
 I had planned to proceed with a deep dive into D.

 With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has 
 opened.
 I do not want to be a part of such community and the future of 
 D does not look good. The alternatives do not look good either. 
 Immature, boring, too restrictive etc. Is assembler the choice 
 if you want to add a low level language to your Intel toolbox?
 I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  I 
 have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 
 'Why should I use D?'. I am greatful for any polite answer:)


For me the decision to invest into a language is 70% pragmatism 
and 30% fun.
I came across D language for a project to  validate and 
manipulate large csv files.
The goal is to check integrity of the content and "transpatch" 
data from several other files into it. The prototype was written 
in python and it works but execution is slow. My second choiche 
was to use Ocaml beacuse I like functional programming. However 
since performance was sub terrestrial I started to implement in 
plain C. The code was blazing fast but I had lots of "fun" with 
the dynamic memory management. (e.g. strange things when realloc 
of internalized data ) Then I came to D and decided to continue 
with it for several reasons:
1. coding experience was very similar to python and C.
2. Language does memory management. No need for malloc, realloc
3. very fast execution time of the code
4. platform independence (Windows and Linux)
5. Native Code w/o Virtual machine (you can distribute an EXE)
6. getting setup very fast: without  installing tons of tools and 
libraries
7. support of functional programming

So for my problem D is a very good choice. I have no problem that 
popularity of D is not so high as for other languages as long as 
it helps me  to get my work done.
Jan 27
prev sibling parent FairEnough <FairEnough gmail.com> writes:
On Wednesday, 17 January 2024 at 07:19:28 UTC, Lars Johansson 
wrote:

 ...
 With the post 'Cloning D', it looks like Pandora's box has 
 opened.
 I do not want to be a part of such community and the future of 
 D does not look good. The alternatives do not look good either. 
 Immature, boring, too restrictive etc. Is assembler the choice 
 if you want to add a low level language to your Intel toolbox?
 I'm seventy one, so I do not have all the time in the world.  I 
 have procrastinated too long already. My humble question is 
 'Why should I use D?'. I am greatful for any polite answer:)



"if a system is too complicated to use, many features will go 
unused because no one has time to learn them".

D does have considerable complexity.

Maybe D does need a fork, called.. SimpleD

But in the meantime, you'll have to navigate D carefully, and 
learn those things which are relevant to your goals.

If learning *all* of language is your goal, you may need more 
time than you've got ;-)

On the otherhand, D's complexity will ensure those neurons keep 
firing, for many decades to come - and that in itself is a good 
thing.
Jan 27