From my admittedly cursory look at D, I find nothing persuasive enough to get me to take it on and learn it when the chances of my ever using it are slim. I guess I'm just old school. It seems that every week there is a new language, framework, etc., and most of them are really not doing anything radically different. As a back end guy, I see most of the churn happens in the web dev world. I prefer old, stable, and very little churn, hence my continued love for COBOL in particular. I also like C++ and Python, but there is something fantastic about COBOL, sh, and awk, which are oft-used. I'm getting less and less enthusiastic about systems stuff now that I'm getting older and more into writing useful tools to help my guys. Call it an easy exit...