Metaprogramming is less fun in D

Re:Metaprogramming is less fun in D by camus2 on Friday April 21, 2017 @01:11PM (#14167372)

> dont reduce Rust and Go relative success to just having google or Mozilla

I don't think Go would have been popular without Google. It's easier to sell a solution to your manager when it is backed by a big org, and when people are paid fulltime to work on it. Same for Rust and Mozilla. The barrier for adoption of new languages is pretty high today in enterprise space.

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Re:Metaprogramming is less fun in D by systems on Friday April 21, 2017 @01:47PM (#14167659)

so why did python and ruby became popular

and why isnt dart more popular

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Re:Metaprogramming is less fun in D by pcwalton on Friday April 21, 2017 @02:02PM (#14167771)

Python became popular because many people saw it as a cleaned-up Perl, and ESR wrote about it.

Ruby became popular because of Rails.

Dart isn't popular because it was designed to be a browser language but did little to court Web developers who like JS (contrary to the HN consensus, a lot of Web developers actually like JS) or other browser vendors.

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Re:Metaprogramming is less fun in D by systems on Friday April 21, 2017 @02:25PM (#14167996)

so you agree with me, we python and ruby didnt need a huge corporate backing and dart even with some corporate backing didnt become popular

more examples that debunk that corporate backing is what made rust or go ... are scala and clojure, scala being way more popular than d and clojure ... and neither have corporate backing

in conclusion, you dont really need corporate backing if you have a nicely designed language that have its own path

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Re:Metaprogramming is less fun in D by shakna on Friday April 21, 2017 @02:51PM (#14168246)

I also said 'mindshare'.

Cs syntax can be awful. Similar symbols with different meanings. But, it was powerful, fast and simpler than some competitors.

Bash is frequently used today, for all sorts of things. Its even in production products, like git. However, even its creator thought it was a kludge.

There is no simple answer to language success, but a large group of people adopting and improving a language is probably going to be helpful.

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Re:Metaprogramming is less fun in D by systems on Friday April 21, 2017 @03:36PM (#14168690)

d is not unpopular because of lack of corporate backing

d is unpopular because of poor project objectives and positioning and playing catch up with other languages rather than leading in any specific area

d needs a novel idea ... i guess they made bet on execution rather than innovation

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Re:Metaprogramming is less fun in D by klickverbot on Friday April 21, 2017 @01:02PM (#14167298)

> Rust and Go .. made better design choices that made them more popular

[citation needed]

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Re:Metaprogramming is less fun in D by iopq on Friday April 21, 2017 @01:31PM (#14167514)

I found Rust by googling languages that compile to LLVM bytecode. It was version 0.6, but I was already excited by the fact that it was promising to be a fast, safe, concurrent language. Even back then it had a value proposition to early adopters.

I wrote a Fizzbuzz implementation. I did it to test language features. As language features and the standard library kept on changing, I kept updating my repository. It's had something like 70+ commits to it since 0.6 days.

https://bitbucket.org/iopq/fizzbuzz-in-rust/src/d4638b2ba3f0...

it's a little bit more complicated than necessary BECAUSE it's a test of new functionality (even now it only compiles on Nightly)

but it has a certain charm to it (fizzbuzz done in a few filter and map operations)

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Re:Metaprogramming is less fun in D by mhh__ on Friday April 21, 2017 @03:35PM (#14168681)

Better design choices or better design?

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Re:Metaprogramming is less fun in D by kmicklas on Friday April 21, 2017 @01:48PM (#14167666)

Rust yes, Go just has Google.

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Re:Metaprogramming is less fun in D by systems on Friday April 21, 2017 @04:45PM (#14169300)

i like your logic .. but i think Go have more than just Google, it also had Rob Pike and Ken Thompson as designers

two legendary programmers

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Re:Metaprogramming is less fun in D by kmicklas on Friday April 21, 2017 @05:56PM (#14169746)

And yet somehow they managed to ignore the majority of what has been learned in the last several decades of language design progress.

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Re:Metaprogramming is less fun in D by grzm on Friday April 21, 2017 @06:01PM (#14169764)

Given their experience, I strongly suspect they made the choices they did knowingly, rather than out of ignorance.

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Re:Metaprogramming is less fun in D by mcguire on Friday April 21, 2017 @08:48PM (#14170543)

These two comments are not mutually incompatible. There is also a reason I've been heard to say that Not Invented Here syndrome was invented at Bell Labs.

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