Comment Re:It's a turd that's slowly being polished (Score 1) 435
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.
True, but it might well fill the same niche and be quite a bit better...
I think D attempted to fill that niche, and it has failed to gain traction, no matter how good it seems.
Wrong tense. D "is attempting" to fill that niche, and so far has failed to gain (much) traction.
D is actually picking up some momentum - it's now being used fairly heavily at Twitter for instance. It's still a quite young language, only invented in 2004.
That said, D does have it's challenges, particularly in that only two people decide what actually goes in the language. They're smart, but like anyone they have their blind spots. It also has reneged on some of the early promises, in particular "optional garbage collection". There is some ongoing work to fix that oversight, though.
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")....
Oh, don't worry, there are plenty of folks constantly complaining about D (check the forums at dlang.org). However, one thing almost all of them have in common is a desire for something better than C++, and many find that in D despite its various warts.
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.
It's worth keeping an eye on, for sure. Walter Bright (the original inventor) has been writing articles at drdobbs.com, they're worth checking out.
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.
I like Python as well, and pypy is looking pretty good as a performance enhancement. Multithreading is is still a problem though.
A couple of other newish languages worth noting are Scala and Julia.
So far Scala is only on the JVM, but it's a powerful, clean language and a huge improvement over Java. It includes functional language features along with OO.
Julia has the potential to be general purpose, but thus far is oriented towards "technical computing" (the same niche as Matlab and R). It's LLVM based and offers easy interoperability with C libraries.