Comment Re:It's a turd that's slowly being polished (Score 1) 435
It was Bjarne himself who said that there are two kinds of programming languages: those everyone complains about, and those that nobody uses.
I'm sure that was said more or less as a joke, but it rubs me the wrong way. The basic suggestion here is that no language that reaches sufficient usage is going to be without its problems. That's fair, but I'm reading from it an implication that the criticism is purely due to its popularity, and that's not fair. There are a lot of problems with C++; some are fixable, some are too inherent in the design to be fixed. A lot of what could be fixed has been, and that's fantastic, but there's still plenty of room for legitimate criticism that has nothing to do with hating what's popular.
I'm not sure there's THAT much room for legitimate criticism in C++, if you know the basic inviolate root principles of the language. Or to put it another way, anything that fixes those particular problems would not be C++ anymore. I think D attempted to fill that niche, and it has failed to gain traction, no matter how good it seems. My implication in posting that quote was "if D was popular, people would be complaining about it too", because all languages have a determined set of detractors (anti-Java "not everything fits into OO", anti-Python "whitespace isn't a substitute for program structure", anti-Lisp "how many brackets do you need")....
Regarding languages that "nobody uses," that doesn't necessarily say anything about their quality; some things just don't take off for whatever confluence of reasons. It remains to be seen whether D specifically will or will not, but from what I understand, it is very well-designed and avoids a lot of the design issues present in C++. That's really cool if true and I'm looking forward to seeing if those claims hold up.
Popularity and quality aren't linked (I compared C++ to PHP in another comment), and I don't mean to imply that D is rubbish. I've given it a cursory glance several times over the years. It just doesn't seem to have a compelling argument for my use - I'm already in C++, and if I have enough leeway to go higher-level I tend to end up in Python, with the massive library of useful stuff behind it.