el_muchacho

What I would like more people to understand is, the NSA planting backdoors into everyone's accounts and software makes everyone less safe to both interior and exterior attacks. So no, it's not a case of NSA spying being a lesser threat to eastern spying, it's a case of the NSA punching holes in your walls letting everyone see what's inside.

C++11 adds a little welcome syntaxic sugar to the language. Yet C++ is nowhere near supporting functional style as well as D does. It really doesn't look and feel the same.

> Or to put it another way: the Soviet government didn't start out surveilling their citizens before they just murdered all the ones who were considered dissidents. They started doing it after they needed to get better at murdering the dissidents. But the real problem, was the fact the government was willing to murder dissidents. Has the US government killed a bunch of your neighbors? Disappeared them?

Your faith in human nature is disarmingly naive. Remember Hitler has been elected. What keeps a democracy alive is not the people at its head or the people that elect their rulers but the structural foundations and laws. You can't trust men. Most of these foundations and laws have already been circumvented by the NSA with the benediction of the US government. That the government seems "nice" to you doesn't matter. As soon as the rulers can disregard laws, they will.

> However, I don't see any direct evidence of police state action; no smoking gun if you will. So I believe it's better to confine ourselves to openly known facts & working to roll back the (already very bad) truth rather than looking forward to a (worse) fork in the road.

You didn't see any diret evidence of massive surveillance either. Yet it is quite clear it exists. All that means is you are willing to wear blindfolds. By not preparing yourself for the worst, you simply let it happen.

Between Word and Wordperfect, the latter was the better product. But Word was easier to use for simple documents.

I don't think there are problems with 64 bit versions, but many computers are still 32 bits. The PC I use right now is 32 bits and I don't feel the urge to buy a new one. So I suppose 32 bit machines will stay around for another decade or so.

The drop after 2007/2008 probably corresponds to the Phobos/Tango debacle, and the fact that Walter decided to fork with D2.

One of the main problems was, he was almost the sole compiler developer, and could hardly keep up with the tasks of maintaining 2 parallel branches and developing new ideas at the same time. People complained that they couldn't get involved as much as they wanted. It's understandable that many people thought that D didn't have a solid future with such uncertainties.

Nowadays, these problems are mostly overcome with a much better organization: there are several committers for the compiler, and several committers for the standard library. Phobos is the standard library, it's maturing, D2 has shown its strengths over D1 and the community is united again, because not only it is deeply involved with the design of the language and standard lib(through the m-l), it is also involved with the implementation of essential parts of it. 2011 has been a very good year for D, and I think that more than ever, the whole project feels like it's going in the right direction.

edit: I guess another reason D isn't gaining as much traction as it could is, it has been removed from the Alioth computer language shootout. For a language which is aimed at raw speed (and was brilliant at that when it was still on the shootout), it's a severe blow.

What is the definition of a system PL ?

Probably because there is no need for it ? If WaitGroup waits for the end of all tasks to continue, there is map/reduce which should do the trick.

Agreed, D is a much bigger and complex language than Go.

Comparing the standard libraries, Phobos doesn't look far behind Go in scope. There are big holes though, like crypto, which is entirely missing, and a complete SQL driver (was in development, but we haven't heard from it for a while now), although there is a binding for SQLite3 and several drivers for major RDBMSs (not in the standard lib, tough). Logging will be included soon. Most of the rest is included (networking uses libCurl), and Phobos quality is continuously improving, some parts of it being excellent both in terms of functionality and performance, like the new regex library. On some other parts, like containers, Phobos seems much more advanced than Go. OTOH, there seems to be more 3-party libraries for Go than for D, but we can't comment on their quality. And of course, both languages allow to bind C libraries.

D is pretty strong at concurrency today. See for instance http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1609144 and http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/parallelism.html