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Is D an Underrated Programming Language?
Nerval's Lobster writes: While some programming languages achieved early success only to fall by the wayside (e.g., Delphi), one language that has quietly gained popularity is D, which now ranks 35 in the most recent Tiobe Index. Inspired by C++, D is a general-purpose systems and applications language that's similar to C and C++ in its syntax; it supports procedural, object-oriented, metaprogramming, concurrent and functional programming. D's syntax is simpler and more readable than C++, mainly because D creator Walter Bright developed several C and C++ compilers and is familiar with the subtleties of both languages. D's advocates argue that the language is well thought-out, avoiding many of the complexities encountered with modern C++ programming. So shouldn't it be more popular?
The languages with the biggest gains this time around include JavaScript, PL/SQL, Perl, VB, and COBOL. (Yes, COBOL.) The biggest drops belonged to the six most popular languages: Objective-C, C, Java, C++, PHP, and C#.
Jeezus fuck. Its bad enough that we get Dicevertisments, but Diceverticements with Campaign ID's on them?
Anyway this is the direct link to the D Language
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I'm an undergrad Computer Science student, and last year I used D for my Compiler Design course in which I wrote just over 18000 lines of D code (including tests and documentation). My experience with the D programming language has meant that I'll probably never use it again for any serious work. The truth is D has some very deep-seated problems within the language, standard libraries, and even the community, which (IMHO) will prevent it from seeing widespread use before a version 3 sees the light of day. To elaborate a tad:
1. Walter and Andrei refuse to make any breaking changes, despite major players in the D ecosystem begging them too.
The language and libraries are riddled with inconsistencies, 'gotcha's', and general ugliness that require breaking changes to fix, and proposals or pull-requests relating to such things are almost categorically rejected on the basis of "lol breaking change". In one case, a well-known community contributor wrote an entire breaking patch to remove virtual dispatch by default (for performance reasons), posted it, got approval from the community, and finally got approval from Walter who merged it (despite it being a breaking change), only to have it all reversed the next day when Andrei found out about it because he "would never have agreed to it". Several medium to large companies that have actually adopted D have literally begged Walter and Andrei to break code and fix the language issues now before it's too late, to no avail. Some examples of such language issues include:
- A horrible mix of keywords and annotation syntax for function/method attributes ('const', 'pure', and 'nothrow' are all keywords, but '@property', and '@nogc' are annotations)
- Huge portions of the standard library are missing attributes like 'pure' and 'nothrow', which directly impacts user code that attempts to include them
- Simply too many attributes, with no attribute inference (template functions/methods infer attributes, but these cannot be virtual and so cannot be overridden in sub-classes)
- Many others - see this example: https://github.com/Hackerpilot/Idiotmatic-D/blob/master/idiotmatic.d
Some of these may seem nitpicky, but they give the language the overall feel of one that is incomplete, hacky, and inappropriate for industry use.
2. Can you turn the garbage collector off? Sure! But don't try and use the standard library if you do!
Most of the standard library is written assuming the garbage collector will clean up after it. Turning it off and using the library therefor means memory leaks ahoy, and leaving it on makes real-time solutions difficult due to the 'stop-the-world' nature of D's GC. There is an effort underway to remove this dependence on the GC, and a short term solution was implemented with the @nogc attribute. That is, yet another attribute, and yet another breaking change that will be rejected when the proposal pops up in a few years to remove the then unused attribute.
3. The documentation poor.
In many cases, the documentation is either out of date, or extremely lacking. At last check, there were still pages referencing deprecated features, or features that have yet to be properly implemented. In the cases that the documentation is correct, it usually lacks basic things such as usage examples and proper explanations of function overloads (and their parameters). To top it all off, the actual presentation of the documentation is incredibly poor when compared with something like Scaladoc.
4. Instead of fixing things, the developers keep tacking on new features, and patches don't get reviewed.
Walter and Andrei are focused on new features, and seem to leave much of the bug-fixing to the community. That's great, until the community proposes a breaking change and instantly gets shot down. On top of that, there are god-knows how many patches and pull-requests that have been awaiting review for *years* without having even been looked at. Such things result in low contributor moral, and have resulted in several community mem