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Comment by kamyarg | Hacker News Reader

... and went bankrupt because of not being able to finding Engineers.

Patently false and disservice to software engineering.

There are many companies (e.g. Weka.IO, Sociomantic, etc.) that hire C++ developers and have them happily write D code. I did work at Weka.IO for a while and never met a single D programmer that was unhappy.

Ali Çehreli

...which is why we’re all still programming COBOL, Fortran, and LISP.

Nothing wrong with the languages you mentioned; they do what they do best. COBOL and Fortran are both fantastic and nothing yet truly replaces them. COBOL is accurate out to 38 digits, which is amazing for such an "old" language. Banks still like their COBOL and it just works. No stupid "libraries and/or frameworks of the month" to worry about, it compiles cleanly and every time, and it's easy to write and maintain. Modern doesn't always mean best. I still write tons of stuff in sh. If it's under 100 lines, it's shell, awk, or similar. COBOL and Fortran still have tons of life left in them. Every time someone undertakes a massive project to replace COBOL in the financial sector (usually driven by a latte-sipping hipster and his recently graduated ilk), it goes pear shaped. We still use hammers. They work.

I have nothing against any of them, I just was surprised anyone thinks that a new(ish) language can't find engineers to use it.

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...

Developers can learn new languages though if a company lets them.

(Edited to be less glib. bad habit)

A friend (C# dev) just refused a job from a company in the Netherlands, for a D dev position. I don't know if it's the same company.

It's not that they're not capable, but some will not want to risk several years of their career to learn it.

honestly, if i were hiring and heard this of an applicant (and didn't have reason to believe it was something else like salary), i would feel that we dodged a bullet.

(that may not be entirely fair, i guess i just tend to be skeptical of people who get hung up on languages.)

I don’t agree with you. Provided you’d persuade him that the company and tech are worth it, I think he’d be a good addition to most companies.

It’s a legit concern.

And did they refuse the job because of D, low salary, not wanting to move to the Netherlands or some other reason?

I could see a C++ dev giving this a try without hurting their career prospects, but C# devs are not exactly known for trying out non-mainstream technologies. If they switch for a couple of years MS will pump out a couple of frameworks and .NET programming languages. Fire and motion as such.

He wants to move to the Netherlands and he was quite explicit that he's apprehensive about D. It's true that C# programmers generally don't venture outside the mainstream.

I can understand this. If I had to pick a marketable/future employment language today, I would pick C# over D (I have used both).

I agree, but that costs money for the company and time for the developer.

Airbnb dropping react native due to a lack of qualified candidates that were articulate in both the native and javascript realm is a great example. Something can work flawlessly with the right conditions (for instance, developers that understand and can implement the path of least resistance across native and react), yet if its prohibitive to create those conditions you are back where you started.

If the dominant ideology among developers is that learning X language or technology costs more of their career than its worth, it dies out. Same goes for the company and their resources.

I'm skeptical about extrapolating too much from a JavaScript example. That ecosystem looks nothing like the rest of the software development world.

Erlang has been around in a niche role for >30 years and still going strong, even stronger now that Elixir has reinvigorated interest in the platform.

My only point in that you should be as careful about creating problems building a team and adding ramp-up time to your product when you attempt to optimize. It's a decision that doesn't go away without lots of heartburn and having employees lose morale rewriting their own work.

According to their own blog, they dropped react because it was a difficult to use piece of technology that was slowing them down and making it difficult to offer a top notch mobile experience.

Yes, they also had difficulties hiring devs which know both native and react, but that's normal. Most mobile devs wouldn't touch react.

> but that costs money for the company and time for the developer

Quite the opposite: The new tool saves time and money.

Airbnb example just shows that one should not jump on the newest thing on the market.

Just tell your new hires here is a book on the language go learn it - which is what I was told at my first Job (world leading RnD).

I am usually not against learning new stuff. But I would also like my learning from current work generalize to my future career. From a pragmatic perspective, learning D is probably going to have less ROI.

Either the company focus solely on finding enthusiasts or they pay the premium to overcome this.

True up to a point but any professional developer needs to be able to pick up a new language quickly - I had to learn Pl/1G to work on a Map reduce code base.

I was assuming a more rational choice but then developing serious technical software in pascal instead of fortran in the 80's was not a rational choice in the first place.

Ideally, the company switching to D wouldn't affect their current or future engineers at all unless some of the engineers are also programmers.

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