It's been about 10 years since I last dipped my toes in the D waters.
At the time (v 2.067) I stumbled across some surprisingly bad warts in the standard library that prevented me from using it for my intended purposes which writing software tools for bioinformatics.
As other posters have noted, language elegance is secondary to the ecosystem when you want to get things done.
For anyone who has been using D for an extended period, has the D ecosystem improved / expanded considerably in the last 5-10 years?
I had no idea the information avoidance was an area of study!
I'm curious to dig into this paper a bit more, because I've been wondering if the same phenomenon relates to:
1) the generally low quality of public discourse on a wide variety of topics -- many people seem to hate discussion based on evidence and would rather "go with their gut" or appeal to some vague notion of "common sense".
2) the popularity of AI -- there seems to be a common sentiment that AI is capable of taking care of the messy, yet important, details of the world around us so that we don't have to. i.e. AI is a information avoidance black box which gives us the liberty of ignoring what's actually in the box.
"The USDA eliminated the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods and the National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection, a spokesperson said."
EDIT: It's so hard to keep track up with the seesaw decision making in DC. Here's some positive news re: food safety that just came out this afternoon:
Larger context: Congressional Republicans are trying to "add $150 billion to the already approved $886 billion national security budget for 2025." this $27B referenced in the title is a subset of this add on to bring defense spending above $1T.
For anyone baffled by the link, this is a send up of Teenage Engineering, a Swedish design house / manufacturer known for their very expensive synths and audio gear: https://teenage.engineering/
I had no idea that the scale of their DOGE meddling was so large with respect to the SSA DMF files -- according to the article, as many of 4,000,000 were consigned to his file by Musk and his DOGies.
Then 40k people likely relying on that income, their ability to have bank accounts, and other things impeded by being on the DMF are screwed. In general, when it comes to living human beings it's better to be too cautious and avoid harm. At least that's what most decent people think.
Wow. Only in tech can you see someone casually suggest it's okay to ruin the lives of tens of thousands of people to save the programmers a few days of work getting things right.
Not to mention that at scale (as any D&D player will tell you), a 1% chance of anything is actually quite large. If it's a 1% chance of a bad thing, it's unacceptably large.
Another restricts the use of the so-called disparate impact rule, which civil rights groups have long said is an important tool for showing discrimination against minorities.
If your whole raison d'etre is to 'show discrimination' then obviously you may like a rule that allows you to 'show discrimination' even where none exists.
At the time (v 2.067) I stumbled across some surprisingly bad warts in the standard library that prevented me from using it for my intended purposes which writing software tools for bioinformatics.
As other posters have noted, language elegance is secondary to the ecosystem when you want to get things done.
For anyone who has been using D for an extended period, has the D ecosystem improved / expanded considerably in the last 5-10 years?