Have a happy and healthy new year!

With D, the phenomenon seems exaggerated, I think, because the vocal community is a larger percentage of the relatively small whole. And when a prominent member of the community lets their frustration about Bugzilla #whatever be known, it seems as if the sky is falling and the language is destined to crash and burn in a spectacular ball of fire. Who’s going to adopt a language that can’t even get that particular issue straightened out?

And then there are the related issues of tools and libraries. If there’s no IDE that can fill in half of a module with a single click, who’s going to want to use D? Text editors are so archaic that useful programs just can’t be written with them. And without a debugger on par with that found in major IDEs, serious software isn’t going to get made. And, OMG, there are *two* standard libraries! What’s a poor, helpless programmer to do?

My take on all of this can be summarized in one word… Bullshit!

I’ll admit that I was quite turned off by D2 in its early stages of development. The fact that it was turning into a completely different language from D1 just didn’t set well with me. But over time, a number of events have occurred that have completely changed my mind and made me look forward to D2′s final release. There’s the fact that Walter brought on additional developers, such as Andrei and Bartosz. Phobos was added to DSource. DRuntime was adopted. The source of the back end was opened up. Don Clugston stepped forward to squash compiler bugs and patch in new features. Several community members contributed patches. Input from the community resulted in changes and improvements, moreso than in the days of D1′s development it seems. As a result of all of this and more, D2 has, within the past few months especially, begun to blossom into something quite special.

The foundation is there and it is being built upon step-by-step. Why would anyone expect D to become widely adopted almost the instant it is released? It takes time for a language to gain mindshare among corporate interests. It needs to be tried and tested, sure, but it also needs to be deemed free of legal issues. It needs a good reputation. And in order for that to happen, it needs people to use it independently, for hobbies and small business projects. D1 is great for those who use it, but there are certainly warts that make it unsuitable for large scale development compared to existing languages. I don’t believe it ever had a chance. But D2 definitely does. Because of the effort behind it, it is addressing D1′s shortcomings and looking to meet the demands of modern software development. The D2 I see now is a far better language than the one I saw several months ago, for sure.

As for the Phobos vs. Tango debate, it’s a moot point at the moment where D2 is concerned. But to be honest, I never understood the issue about “two standard libraries”. To me, Tango is not and never has been a standard library. There is only one standard library, and that’s Phobos. Tango is an alternative to the standard. Yes, there’s a real issue in that some libraries support one and not the other. But one of the aspects of project development is deciding which libraries to use. In C++, you have to decide whether or not to use the STL, and these days whether or not to use Boost. Once that decision is made, you have to decide which bits of STL or Boost you want to use. Then the libraries you use may or may not make use of either STL or Boost, which may or may not affect your memory allocation strategy or your build management. I fail to see how choosing between Phobos and Tango is any worse. With D1, you pick one and stick with it or you try to accommodate both. Either way, you plan your project around your decision and life goes on.

You can complain that D is not suitable for large scale software development because there aren’t enough tools and libraries. You can say that without feature A, this group of programmers will be turned off, or that feature B will alienate that group of programmers. You can point out that no one in a position to do so is going to risk thousands or millions of dollars of their development budget on a language that has yet to go mainstream. You may be absolutely right. But to say it’s never going to happen for D is completely off base.

D has momentum. The community fluctuates and its always hard to tell just how big it is. But there are always new names in the newsgroups and IRC. And these days, mention D in any programming forum and a number of people will have heard of it. I sometimes get email regarding Derelict from people I’ve never heard of, asking about one thing or another. People are actually using D, even if we never see what they’re doing with it. And that’s a good thing.

Personally, I don’t care one way or another if D becomes the next big thing in the corporate world. As long as it’s available for me to use, I’ll be happy. And as a small part of helping that to happen, I’ll keep this blog going and work on Derelict when and as I can. I have more projects I’d like to work on if I can find the time. And that’s how D will eventually become more pervasive. Whether you contribute to existing open source projects, start your own, or even develop in-house or commercial software, just using D brings it that much closer to the big leagues.

So it would be great if people could stop with the doom and gloom scenarios and stop worrying about who’s going to use D and who won’t bother with it. It would be much better to focus all of that energy on helping to get D2 finalized, or enhancing the quality and quantity of tools and libraries. That’s the foundation. The rest will come in time.

Eric is also looking for volunteers to contribute to the project. To that end, he has put up a list of tasks that he would like to see implemented. If nothing there strikes your fancy, you might find something on the roadmap.

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This time, the computer I’m replacing isn’t really all that bad. I’ve upgraded the graphics card twice, added more RAM, I have no problems with any games I want to play and it runs well. But I’ve been using it for almost five years and I really wanted to play with a multicore CPU. So I decided that after buying the new one I’d keep the old one and give Ubuntu another spin.

The first version of Ubuntu I ever used was Edgy Eft. I had dabbled with other distros over the years, but this was by far the easiest to get up and running with. Still, it wasn’t without its problems. The subsequent versions also gave me one headache or another. Hardy Heron, though, has so far blown me away.

The install process is much improved over previous versions. I went with manual partitioning since I wanted to install across two hard drives. Even that was a cake walk (I still cringe thinking of my first Linux partitioning experience during a Red Hat 6 install back around the turn of the century). The install process is so much more streamlined than in previous versions and went quite fast. The last time I installed Ubuntu on the same box (7.04, IIRC, just on the slave drive) I remember staring at the screen for quite a while during the installation. And this time, not once during installation did I see any sort of prompt for configuring XWindows. Wow!

The next big surprise was the one click install of the NVidia drivers. The last couple of times I toyed with Ubuntu, I used Envy and thought it was a life saver. This time, I found an option in the administration menu to install it (which, I suppose uses the more recent EnvyNG internally). Getting XWindows properly configured and the official drivers installed has always been the biggest point of contention with every version of every Linux distro I had ever tried (which is just a dozen or so, really). This time, there was no need to go out and find the latest Envy script, no need to visit the Ubuntu forums for guidance… one click and a reboot later and I had a working, hardware accelerated XWindows configuration. Even simpler than it is on Windows!

Next was getting my development environment set up. The two primary things I was after (besides gcc, which was already installed) were Sun’s JDK and D. This latest version of Ubuntu now makes Sun’s JDK available from the Universe apt source. So a few minutes after installation, I had the latest JDK installed along with GDC, which is also available through apt get. I had used DMD on previous installs, but I really need to get up to speed with GDC. I still haven’t looked at installing Tango yet, but that’s on my TODO list.

The only problem I have had during this installation of Ubuntu was not a problem with Ubuntu at all. I dusted off my old router to get the LAN set up again. After a few hours of wondering why the hell I could ping my ISP’s DNS servers, but no domain names were getting resolved, I noticed an option in the router configuration menu to reset it to factory settings. I clicked. The router rebooted and I had internet access again.

This afternoon, after the wife and I saw Sex and the City, I bought a new mouse. I’ve never paid so much money for a mouse, but I’m liking it so far. I’m used to running two monitors, so I have two connected to my new box. One of them is connected via the KVM switch, along with the keyboard. This allows me to keep an eye on the new box while working on the old one. But if I run the mouse through the KVM, I have to switch out of whatever I’m doing on the old one in order to react to something on the new one. I spent yesterday swapping my USB mouse between them. That was just annoying. So with the new mouse, I can work on both comps at once if I need to. At least until I need to type something. I really don’t like the idea of having two keyboards on my desk, so I can live with that for now.

It’s rare for me to publish a not-so-D-centric post here, but I know I have made a few comments over the past couple of years of maintaining this blog that highlight my lack of enthusiasm for Linux. Each version of Ubuntu that I have tried has swung me around more than the last. The initial first impression has gotten better each time, but there’s always been something to burst my bubble. But I think this one has pushed me over the edge (in a good way). I’m going to spend some time doing as much of my development work as is feasible on the Linux box to see where I get with it. The last time I only lasted a couple of weeks. This time around, I have high hopes. So far, this is the first version of Linux I’ve used where I didn’t feel I have to already be a Linux user to really use it.

If all goes well, perhaps I can stop relying on other people to handle Derelict issues with Linux and/or GDC. Now if I can just get a Mac I’ll be self sufficient!

Technorati Tags: Linux, Ubuntu, Hardy Heron

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