• IanWizard (7/7) Jan 22 2013 I keep hearing a lot of people saying that they think that D is a
• angel (4/4) Jan 22 2013 You could always ask, "What niche ?". You know, like
• Nick Sabalausky (9/16) Jan 22 2013 D is a general-purpose language, so when people call it "niche" I
• Jonathan M Davis (9/12) Jan 22 2013 Exactly. Regardless of how good D is, its user base is still relatively ...

"IanWizard" <1.am.w1z4rd gmail.com> writes:

I keep hearing a lot of people saying that they think that D is a 
"niche" language.  Did I completely miss something, or are they 
just misinformed?  I've never thought of D as a niche language.  
I consider (and use) it as what Cpp should have been.  Like a 
love child from C, C++, and Python.  I'd be very interested to 
hear others thoughts on the subject, as well as other common 
misconceptions.

"angel" <andrey.gelman gmail.com> writes:

You could always ask, "What niche ?". You know, like 
web-programming is a niche, even though pretty large one.
I think "general public" does not know about even existence of D, 
or most of other modern languages.

Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe semitwist.com> writes:

On Tue, 22 Jan 2013 20:38:29 +0100
"IanWizard" <1.am.w1z4rd gmail.com> wrote:

 I keep hearing a lot of people saying that they think that D is a 
 "niche" language.  Did I completely miss something, or are they 
 just misinformed?  I've never thought of D as a niche language.  
 I consider (and use) it as what Cpp should have been.  Like a 
 love child from C, C++, and Python.  I'd be very interested to 
 hear others thoughts on the subject, as well as other common 
 misconceptions.

D is a general-purpose language, so when people call it "niche" I
suspect they're simply referring to D's user base currently being much
smaller than C/C++/Java/Python/etc. The "niche" of D users.

OTOH, D can be (and often is) very accurately described as a
reimagined, cleaned-up C++, so maybe their line of thinking is "Ok,
so it's for C++ users that are unhappy with C++", which might a niche
*if* that were *all* D was well suited for.

"Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisProg gmx.com> writes:

On Tuesday, January 22, 2013 16:16:33 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
 D is a general-purpose language, so when people call it "niche" I
 suspect they're simply referring to D's user base currently being much
 smaller than C/C++/Java/Python/etc. The "niche" of D users.

Exactly. Regardless of how good D is, its user base is still relatively small 
- especially in industry. I'd fully expect that anyone specifically looking for 
a job programming in D would have a very hard time of it. They exist, but 
they're not common.

But the user base is growing, so D may yet become a mainstream programming 
language like we'd like it to. Plenty of other programming languages have 
taken a while to really catch on (e.g. Python).

- Jonathan M Davis