Considerations for programming language design: a rebuttal

Walter Bright, who designed D, wrote an article called “So You Want to Write Your Own Language”. I love D and I respect Mr. Bright, but I disagree with nearly everything he says in it, mostly because D itself and Digital Mars’s work in general is (and should be) extremely atypical of the kind of programming language design that occurs today.

Digital Mars has been writing cross-platform compilers for decades (and when I was first getting into C on Windows in the early naughts, Digital Mars’s C compiler was the one that gave me the least trouble), and D was positioned as an alternative to C++ as a general purpose language. The thing is, most languages being developed today aren’t going to be C-like performance-conscious compiled languages that need to build binaries on multiple platforms and live in environments with no development toolchains (all major platforms either ship with a GNU or GNU-like UNIX dev toolchain or have a system like cygwin or homebrew that makes installing one straightforward), and trying to compete with C++ is not only technically difficult but also foolish for wholly non-technical reasons.

Design

The second piece of advice Mr. Bright gives is to stick relatively close to familiar syntax, in order to maximize audience. This makes sense if you are trying to compete with C++, as D does. But D is a great illustration of the problems with this approach: D does everything C++ does better than C++ does it, and yet it has failed to displace C++…