Live data from Hacker News

D Programming Language

dlang.org

21–30 of 278 posts

Re: D Programming Language

#21
post #16
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that is why carpenters are still around and no one buys Ikea.

Is your proposition that programmers are now incapable of writing code?

Eventually yes, when incapable becomes a synonymous with finding a job in an AI dominated software factory industry.

Enterprise CMS deployment projects have already dropped amount of assets teams, translators, integration teams, backend devs, replaced by a mix of AI, SaaS and iPaaS tools.

Now the teams are a fraction of the size they used to be like five years ago.

Fear not, there will be always a place for the few ones that can invert a tree, calculate how many golf balls fit into a plane, and are elected to work at the AI dungeons as the new druids.

Re: D Programming Language

#22

D is like a forced meme at that point. Never has an old language gained traction, its all about the initial network effects created by excitement. No matter how much better it is from C now, C is slowly losing traction and its potential replacements already have up and running communities (Rust, zig etc)

This is not true. It took about 20 years for Python to reach the levels of its today's popularity. JavaScript also wasn't so dominant and omnipresent until the Chrome era.

Also, many languages that see a lot of hype initially lose most of their admirers in the long run, e.g. Scala.

Re: D Programming Language

#23
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. We wrote code before LLMs and we can after their advent too

Yeah, that is why carpenters are still around and no one buys Ikea.

> that is why carpenters are still around and no one buys Ikea

The irony in this statement is hilarious, and perfectly sums up the reality of the situation IMO.

For anyone who doesn't understand the irony: a carpenter is someone who makes things like houses, out of wood. They absolutely still fucking exist.

Industrialised furniture such as IKEA sells has reduced the reliance on a workforce of cabinet makers - people who make furniture using joinery.

Now if you want to go ask a carpenter to make you a table he can probably make one, but it's going to look like construction lumber nailed together. Which is also quite a coincidence when you consider the results of asking spicy autocomplete to do anything more complex than auto-complete a half-written line of code.

Re: D Programming Language

#24

D is like a forced meme at that point. Never has an old language gained traction, its all about the initial network effects created by excitement. No matter how much better it is from C now, C is slowly losing traction and its potential replacements already have up and running communities (Rust, zig etc)

> Never has an old language gained traction, its all about the initial network effects created by excitement.

Python?! Created in 1991, became increasingly popular – especially in university circles – only in the mid-2000s, and then completely exploded thanks to the ML/DL boom of the 2010s. That boom fed back into programming training, and it's now a very popular first language too.

Love it or hate it, Python was a teenager by the time it properly took off.

Re: D Programming Language

#26
post #20

D is like a forced meme at that point. Never has an old language gained traction, its all about the initial network effects created by excitement. No matter how much better it is from C now, C is slowly losing traction and its potential replacements already have up and running communities (Rust, zig etc)

Python was first released in 1991. It rumbled along for about 20 years until exploding in popularity with ML and the rise of data science.

That's not how I remember it. Excitement for python strongly predated ML and data science. I remember python being the cool new language in 1997 when I was still in high school. Python 2.4 was already out, and O'Reilly had put several books kn the topic already it. Python was known as this almost pseudo code like language thst used indentation for blocking. MIT was considering switching to it for its introductory classes. It was definitely already hyped back then -- which led to U Toronto picking it for its first ML projects that eventually everyone adopted when deep learning got started.

Re: D Programming Language

#27
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. We wrote code before LLMs and we can after their advent too

Yeah, that is why carpenters are still around and no one buys Ikea.

> Yeah, that is why carpenters are still around and no one buys Ikea.

I'm sorry, what? Are you suggesting that Ikea made carpenters obsolete? It's been less than 6 months since last I had a professional carpenter do work in my house. He seemed very real. And charged very real prices. This despite the fact that I've got lots of Ikea stuff.

Re: D Programming Language

#29
post #26
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python was first released in 1991. It rumbled along for about 20 years until exploding in popularity with ML and the rise of data science.

That's not how I remember it. Excitement for python strongly predated ML and data science. I remember python being the cool new language in 1997 when I was still in high school. Python 2.4 was already out, and O'Reilly had put several books kn the topic already it. Python was known as this almost pseudo code like language thst used indentation for blocking. MIT was considering switching to it for its introductory cla…

It was popular as a teaching language when it started out, along side BASIC or Pascal. When the Web took off, it was one of a few that took off for scripting simple backends, along side PHP, JS and Ruby.

But the real explosion happened with ML.

Re: D Programming Language

#30
post #6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those curious what ownership and borrowing looks like in D: https://dlang.org/blog/2019/07/15/ownership-and-borrowing-in...

I don't know D so I'm probably missing some basic syntax. If pointers cannot be copied how do you have multiple objects referencing the same shared object?

> If pointers cannot be copied

They can.

Post reply on HN