[philwelch]

The provided article:

* Does not explain why "everyone really likes D now"

* Provides no evidence that "everyone really likes D now"

* Doesn't have the title of the submission (though, to be fair, the actual title is a vaguely similar rude joke that you can probably infer).

* Does give actionable advice about how to start programming in D, if you wanted to do that.

I guess my big, unanswered question is: what does D have over all the newer and more popular compiled languages out there that seem to occupy overlapping niches, like Go, Swift, Kotlin, and Rust? Or, for that matter, the older standbys of C, C++, Java, and C#? And if that seems like a wide spread, the obvious follow-up is: where in this space does D live? It's object-oriented (like C++, Java, C#, Kotlin, and Swift) and "makes memory access available" (like C, C++, and Rust), but that's all I can tell.

[scrumper]

> * Provides no evidence...

I'd go further and say it provides the opposite - it shows a low and declining search trend.

The rest of it is a fairly sloppy guide on how to set up Atom for D development.

Seems to have been written just to have an excuse to make that puerile joke.

[geezerjay]

> I'd go further and say it provides the opposite - it shows a low and declining search trend.

This.

Additionally, the only moment in time when D was a reasonable concept was before C++11, when the development of C++ was stalled and there were a few pain points with C++98 that justified picking up other tools.

Since then C++ started evolving and a majority of those pain points were addressed, thus leaving D without any major selling point or even purpose.

To make matters worse, with the whole industry shift to the web C+ has since seen a decline in market share. Therefore D is placed as a poor replacement for the incumbent of a market share in decline.

[philwelch]

> Additionally, the only moment in time when D was a reasonable concept was before C++11, when the development of C++ was stalled and there were a few pain points with C++98 that justified picking up other tools.

I don't know enough about D to dispute this, but in a backhanded way, this is a pretty damning appraisal of D. It's not just the "industry shift to the web" that has led to the decline of C++. Why do people write server-side applications in Java or Go instead of C++? Why do people write mobile apps in Objective-C, Java, or Swift instead of C++? Even in the remaining domain of desktop applications and systems code, C++ isn't necessarily the go-to choice anymore.

And so, if D doesn't offer anything over C++ that couldn't be addressed by bolting even more features onto C++, why the heck does it exist?