Wired reports on some new programming languages.
People are constantly creating new programming languages, but because the software world is already saturated with so many if them, the new ones rarely get used by more than a handful of coders-especially if they're built by an ex-Symantec engineer without the backing of a big-name outfit. But Bright's new language, known as D, was much further along than the one Alexandrescu was working on, dubbed Enki, and Bright said they'd both be better off if Alexandrescu dumped Enki and rolled his ideas into D. Alexandrescu didn't much like D, but he agreed. "I think it was the beer", he now says.
The result is a programming language that just might defy the odds. Nine years after that night in Seattle, a $200-million startup has used D to build its entire online operation, and thanks to Alexandrescu, one of biggest names on the internet is now exploring the new language as well. Today, Alexandrescu is a research scientist at Facebook, where he and a team of coders are using D to refashion small parts of the company's massive operation. Bright, too, has collaborated with Facebook on this experimental software, as an outsider contractor. The tech giant isn't an official sponsor of the language-something Alexandrescu is quick to tell you- but Facebook believes in D enough to keep him working on it full-time, and the company is at least considering the possibility of using D in lieu of C++, the venerable language that drives the systems at the heart of so many leading web services.
In fact, Facebook is working to bridge this gap with not one but two languages. As it tinkers with D, the company has already revamped much of its online empire with a new language called Hack, which, in its own way, combines speed with simplicity. While using Hack to build the front-end of its service- the webpages you see when you open the service in your web browser-Facebook is experimenting with D on the back-end, the systems that serve as the engine of its social network. Certainly, D still faces a long road to success. But this new language has already come further than most.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:21PM
So I was browsing the Dlang FAQ and saw that the compiler doesn't fully implement their own spec for parallel data access. [dlang.org] That appears to be a big deal as good support for parallelism is pretty important now that every cpu is multi-core.
Can anyone say if that is an old bug in the FAQ, does the compiler do the right thing now?
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Wednesday July 09 2014, @06:53AM
D was 'the next big thing' 10-15 years ago, shortly after it was initially released.
Now, not so much. Even if a large company does use it for some of it's projects.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:23PM
It would seem with the glut of C(insert derivative) programmers around that choosing an obscure language, and paying a full time developer thereof would need extraordinary justification in most businesses.
Is it THAT MUCH more efficient in programmer time or execution time?
Is is an obfuscation technique to protect the IP of Facebook's code base?
Does it lock in their programmers making them progressively less employable elsewhere?
Is it just another crazy and reckless Zuck-tangent?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday July 08 2014, @06:53PM
Is it THAT MUCH more efficient in programmer time or execution time?
D has been said to be a lot nicer to use, if you come from C++ you will appreciate it.
Is is an obfuscation technique to protect the IP of Facebook's code base?
How would using an open language obfuscate their code base? I assume you don't understand programming.
Does it lock in their programmers making them progressively less employable elsewhere?
Any good programmer can pick up a new language and adjust to it. If you can't move from one language to another you are already less employable (perhaps unemployable). Any good programmer has probably been through at least half a dozen languages until they find their favorite.
Is it just another crazy and reckless Zuck-tangent?
This is not a real question.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday July 09 2014, @06:38PM
You and I know that, but HR doesn't. Spend 10 years writing COBOL and you can forget about actually being hired anywhere that isn't a COBOL shop. It doesn't matter if you have just turned 30 and you are also a Ruby/Python/C++ god, they'll just send you a rejection letter with coupons for Geritol and Metamucil enclosed.
Thus you are unemployable.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday July 10 2014, @12:42PM
I would simply pad resume depending on what kind of shop it is. If I am going from a Java shop to a C++ shop and I am proficient in both, I am going to put C++ on my resume and make Java a footnote. Are they going to actually call your employer and ask "hey did sjames actually do c++ programming?" Of course not. You want to get your foot in the door for an interview. They might question you about your previous employment but you can work around that.
I am sorry to say but the idiotic HR culture and its resume obsession has led to many people padding, lying and giving fake references (eg using family or friends businesses as references) just to get an interview. And guess what? It works. If it were me doing the hiring, I would look for two things: people skills and competence. Everything else is bullshit.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday July 10 2014, @06:30PM
I do agree that HR is full of it. They should stick to dealing with benefits, retirement and such and just act as assistants to the manager who is looking to hire someone. They should not play gatekeeper.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Lagg on Tuesday July 08 2014, @07:21PM
Yes. It's reinvention of the wheel at its most senseless and dare I say even malicious. Note how Google and other such companies are trying really, really hard to make specifications of all kinds more complex and unwieldy to the point that only a company such as them can properly implement them. That one stupid and really not very novel language I forget the name of that they want to replace JS with is a prime example as far as programming goes, but there are others like any of the plethora of crap they're doing to make Chrome into everything and a kitchen sink.
Given the users here I don't need to say why that's bad. But even trying to ignore the malicious points at best these are toys designed by someone with not enough knowledge and too much money at their disposal. All these languages I've seen and have even tried to use are frankly not that big of an improvement and try to do what C++ did but somehow manage to be even worse. C# is ironically the most usable of these types of languages. A few years ago we'd call these languages esoteric or domain specific at best. Now they're being called "revolutionary" even though they do the same old shit in a more convoluted way. It's really annoying but thankfully companies don't seem to be partaking in the masturbation. Besides the ones that designed the language anyway.
Other than that though, I hope your implication that it's just a way for a programmer to market themselves or lock themselves into something hard to decipher is false. Because that is just disgusting. More disgusting than a critical system written in PHP. Disgusting on the level of Microsoft adding bloat because it stops people from making something portable. Because it moves away from writing solid code and robust programs into the realm of writing the kind of code that purposefully makes the codebase an indecipherable and inefficient mess. It moves away from striving towards elegance and portability for the sake of keeping oneself in a job or position of power. This is the kind of thing that ignorant freelance programmers from Russia do (I say russia because it brings to mind one specific case I myself came across as I too am a freelancer usually hired to clean up after other freelancers), not companies looking to maintain awesome software.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Tuesday July 08 2014, @07:32PM
To be fair, you could've asked the same questions of C when it came out.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday July 08 2014, @07:57PM
True, C was essentially born with Unix, and vise versa, and there wasn't a lot of choices back then, and they were all equally obscure, mostly research projects.
I guess the news here is that D is born into a world of alternatives.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:26PM
Hehe heh. Heh. Yeah. Hehe heh heh.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:44PM
It said "As it tinkers with D..." not "As it tinkers with the D..."
One of these is far more common.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:29PM
D is 13 years old. In what universe is that considered "new"?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:41PM
In the sense that nobody uses it aside from one fan (Zuckerberg) and people who have no choice (FB's programmers and users).
(Score: 1) by Lunix Nutcase on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:43PM
That would make it obscure not new. That D exists would be news to many people, but that would not make the language new.
(Score: 1) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:47PM
I remember the old Dr. Dobb's print magazine had a column where a guy implemented something in D, so it's not new. I guess it was interesting, in some sense, but each month I cared less about it and eventually quit reading the column.
Almost any niche language will have a success story or two. Difficult to go beyond that to achieve critical mass and get the language used widely. Anyone with a lexx/yacc grammar can build their own language, but to get other people to use it, it has to be worth making the painful cognitive switch from the handful of languages you're using now to the new language. So it's got to be really compelling. (Unless you have a corporation cramming it down your throat, like Apple is doing with Swift.)
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @06:11PM
I agree that backing by a major corporation can be hugely instrumental in making a language popular, but why the hate for Swift? Swift incorporates many useful features with a minimum of fuss on the part of the programmer. It steals all the best ideas from languages both popular and niche to create what many programmers would want today in a modern language. It's a synthesis of proven ideas. Its handling of tuples, for example, is elegant and convenient, just to name one feature.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Subsentient on Tuesday July 08 2014, @07:31PM
Because it's apple, which means almost certainly that it's going to be for Mac/iOS only, that it's going to require apple specific tools, that it's got some sort of patent/copyright encumberence of some form, and that it's going to be designed to dictate what the programmer can and can't do.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @08:24PM
Jealous? I don't get it. If you are an Apple programmer, you already use Apple tools to write your software, which runs only on Apple hardware. You already have to deal with the Apple store restrictions on your app. All of those conditions existed before Swift, and would exist no matter what programming language you used. For non-Apple programmers, Swift will not hurt them (or affect them at all) in any way. Why the butt hurt?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @08:42PM
So no different than any other programming language?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday July 08 2014, @06:43PM
An obscure language living on the edge supported as a hobby probably isn't newsworthy.
But when a major corporation employs the largest part of the developer base, and uses it in-house, and is about the ONLY place using it (as best I can tell, there is no user list, and no sponsors list), then it becomes newsworthy.
That someone would bet the farm on an obscure language and build their entire operations around it certainly is newsworthy to me.
That I might have seen a reference to that language some time in the past doesn't detract from that. It actually adds interest if you ask me.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Funny) by PinkyGigglebrain on Tuesday July 08 2014, @06:12PM
In what universe is that considered "new"?
Uh, one that started 13 years later than this one.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 3, Funny) by Horse With Stripes on Tuesday July 08 2014, @07:33PM
35 years ago I got a 'D' in my first programming class. That was my first exposure to 'D' programming ;-)
(Score: 2) by Theophrastus on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:32PM
(someone has to mention this curious bit of PR. i'm just sorry it had to be me)
"new language, known as D" and from the (recently edited) wikipedia page [wikipedia.org]: "Walter Bright decided to start working on a new language in 1999"
(Score: 1) by Lunix Nutcase on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:36PM
And it's first release was in 2001. C# is "newer" than D and no one would call C# a new language.
(Score: 2) by Theophrastus on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:48PM
So for anyone of an evil destroy-the-message mind-set, they should immediately announce that they've had a brainstorm(!) of fusing functional languages with a new distributed agent-based strongly client typed cloud-ready compiled just out of time language: E#++42 ...calling all venture capitalists! <sotto-voce legal voice mode>actual language may not exist</sotto-voce>
(Score: 1) by Lunix Nutcase on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:57PM
But can it run on rails like Ruby does?
(Score: 2) by Theophrastus on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:59PM
damn... "rails"! i knew i was forgetting a few. maybe also throw in: "app-able"; i winced at that one recently.
(Score: 1) by Lunix Nutcase on Tuesday July 08 2014, @06:05PM
And don't forget that it must be event-driven, asynchronous and have non-blocking IO.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:41PM
So yeah, more accurate headline:
"Area Man Who Bet A Lot of Time and Money on Obscure Language Really Hopes It Will Become Big"
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Blackmoore on Tuesday July 08 2014, @05:54PM
Wired has an attention span of a 3 year old. if it wasnt reported last week - it is new to them.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday July 08 2014, @06:34PM
D is old, really old, like 13 years. There must be someone who fooled around with it in the last decade or so?
Last time I fooled around with it, it was very (C++)++ ish, sort of a "if you're going to try to be all things to all people like C++ tries, we'll do a microscopically better job of it and also do even more things". If I knew C++ well, which I haven't used for good or evil since 2005-ish, then I would just use C++ and skip the D.
As a long term thing I've been watching it to see when/if they collapse over the complexity event horizon. But it just keeps on chuggin along and getting bigger, every time some feature or fad becomes popular someone sticks it in D making it even bigger. I could see it being popular as a educational language, here's a platform of a language for almost any style of programming you'd like to teach.
Other early impressions were the compiler situation is, or used to be, really weird. Like there was the "real" closed source compiler and a open GCC port that mostly worked and it was a little confusing that way. Presumably they've tidied up, or as these political things tend to go, maybe its even worse now. It wasn't really open source compatible or part of the open source community or act like an open source project. It was more cobol like in that way. Our community is closed to the concept of outsider participation, but we'll host on github anyway. Hey, free hosting!
I don't see using it for absolutely anything in the near future, privately or at work. But if I had a job for C++, I'd think about the D instead. Hmm, that sounded wrong.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 08 2014, @06:39PM
"I could see it being popular as a educational language, here's a platform of a language for almost any style of programming you'd like to teach."
Whoops well that was a mistake upon thinking about it, wish I could edit. Its about as capable as Scala but only compiles natively, no JVM, so its a PITA for .edu. Whaddya mean I can't run it on a rasp pi or a mac, etc. Its faster at compiling and running than Scala but in .edu world that doesn't matter as much.
So forget I wrote that. .edu is all python'd up now anyway. Finally vanquished the C-family monsters and got something decent in, they're not backsliding to a C family again.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday July 08 2014, @07:52PM
D is an extremely good language, and considerably better than C++ unless you enjoy doing memory management by hand. Even then, it's handling of strings and unicode is much better. (As in "I find C++ nearly unusable in comparison.".)
OTOH, D is sadly deficient in libraries. This is a real weak spot. It will probably stay a weak spot until either someone puts some real money behind it, or until it becomes popular enough that bindings to C libraries will be built and maintained. (D is still changing with reasonable rapidity, though nothing like what it was a few years ago.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by Lunix Nutcase on Tuesday July 08 2014, @08:45PM
If you're still doing memory management by hand in C++ in anything but a small amount of cases, you're doing it wrong. C++ has had features to automate memory management for more than 15 years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @08:49PM
Automatic variables and smart pointers eliminate nearly of all manual memory management in C++. If you're still using raw pointers all over the place in C++ then you fail it.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday July 09 2014, @05:43AM
Personally, I don't use ANY C++ pointers anymore. Which was my point. I have occasionally checked back to see if it would be a decent language for some project or other, but unicode and string processing in C++ are so bad, that I've never decided to return. Also building things with Boost seems to be ... peculiar. Jamfiles seem considerably worse than makefiles, and I'm not thrilled with CMake, either. Were I to use C++, I'd probably use either Qt or WxWidgets, but both have adopted MS's peculiar idea of what is a good unicode representation. (Perhaps they got it from Java?)
So while I know that things like "smart-pointers" exist in several flavors in C++, I don't "know" them. And they don't really feel like a part of the language, more like a kludgy add-on. Vala does things much better, as do Java, Python, D, Eiffel, Scheme, etc. Even Erlang, though I've never actually used it for anything, because I always need to have SOME mutable state. (Yes, I know that Erlang allows some mutable state. Perhaps if I were an Erlang expert I could do what I need with the Erlang version. But getting from here to there seems impossible.)
The one thing C++ has that I really need over C is instance scoped variables. (Yes, I know you can fudge them in C with gobject style heap allocations, but please...)
I'm afraid I think the STL was a big mistake. The intent was good, and pieces of it even make sense, but the mess that it has become is...terrible. I'd rather use Eiffel.
What I'd really like is for Vala to get the bugs out and document itself well. Currently (i.e., last year) unless you are already a gobject programmer it's nearly unusable, but the basic syntax and design are there, and are excellent. AND it's easier to like with C libraries (though that ALSO needs to be documented).
OTOH, C++? Ugh. Too much garbage was kept with each revision, and bad choices were never revisited and redone. Even Ada is a better choice. (Actually, Ada isn't bad except for the default deterministic string length, making it difficult to compare strings of different lengths. But just like you can use smart-pointers in C++, you can use variable length strings in Ada. And again like C++, they just don't feel like a real part of the language, even though they're in a required library.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by mrider on Tuesday July 08 2014, @08:45PM
I tried doing a project in D. The language itself is pleasant to work in: I picked it up easily, and I was productive quickly. The major problem I had was lack of libraries (which has already been mentioned). They talk about using C libraries from D, but when it came right down to it, I found I had to spend a lot of time digging into the C library to figure out why my D code wouldn't work. Ultimately I found it easier to just write it in C.
Flesh out the libraries and I'd be there in a minute. For now, I'd only use it for a project that required 99% original code.
Doctor: "Do you hear voices?"
Me: "Only when my bluetooth is charged."
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 09 2014, @12:04PM
"Flesh out the libraries and I'd be there in a minute"
This is a better summary of my D project experience, than my own summary.
I was a couple pages of source code into trying to do "not very much" when I got really sick of it, and just redid the whole thing in like 15 lines of Perl (and a bunch of use lines for CPAN modules) in about an hour. This was years ago not last week and libraries might be better. I don't even remember what I was trying to do other than it involved interfacing to about five different systems simultaneously and a lot of data validation feeding into another system.
Voluntarily writing library functions is interesting and fun. However, involuntarily having to write library functions because you have to, is just a PITA.
(Score: 2) by mrider on Wednesday July 09 2014, @04:19PM
Perl lives at a whole different level of abstraction. I love Perl, and use it whenever I can (despite being a crap Perl programmer). But not all things can be done in Perl, sometimes one needs a lower level of abstraction. For example a C compiler is written in C, but a Perl compiler isn't written in Perl. Sounds like your project wasn't a good candidate for D if you were able to knock it out so easily in Perl, and it's likely I would have used Perl same as you did if I were performing the same task.
Maybe if more people start using D, then more programmers will port various libraries. That's really all that's stopping me from using it today.
Doctor: "Do you hear voices?"
Me: "Only when my bluetooth is charged."
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 09 2014, @05:40PM
"Sounds like your project wasn't a good candidate for D"
Kind of. My hope was being something I've done before, and something I know how to do in Perl, makes it likely I'll figure out how to do it in D despite not knowing D very well.
That's pretty much how I learn all new languages. I wouldn't want to debug the business logic, plus have no idea how to formulate it in at least one non-D language, plus learn a new language (D) all at the same time.
Like the old claim about Project Euler problems... Yes Octave or GAP are the right tool for the job, but they're great questions to use to learn a new language. Sometimes you have to break the rules, from memory the very first P.E. problem has a formal "official" mathematical way to solve it algebraically on pen and paper in like 2 minutes, but its an awesome test subject to try about 10 different brute force techniques... so recurse, tail call recursion, populate an array, plain ole brute force loop, bunch of ideas like that. I remember doing something really deviant to solve that one by spawning off a bazillion threads in Erlang, that was totally cool. And I did something nuts with a map reduce in Scala. Dumb as a systemic solution, but cool to program weird stuff and see it run, and sometimes it even works LOL. Some of the PE problems that can only be solved indirectly math-a-magically are kind of boring because they were scaled to be impossible to brute force, which is no fun at all, and that's where I part my fandom with P.E.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday July 08 2014, @11:04PM
As someone that never really liked C++, I found D to be rather nice to work with when I looked at it a few years ago. It felt like some sort of bastard child of Perl and Python, both languages that I already like using, so it was comfortable to me. The problem I had was not having a good reason to stick with it because most things I need get solved with a Perl or Python script.
Biggest drawback seemed to be a general lack of libraries, and mucking with using C libs was more work than I felt like investing when I looked into it. Still, it seemed like a nice language, and if more people are deciding to support it now, it can't be a bad thing.
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Wednesday July 09 2014, @06:42PM
I made a (clone of a) game with it.
It was a pleasure to learn and code in D.
It's the best systems language yet, waaaay nicer than C++.
Unfortunately, it's author was kind of a dick and didn't opened the development to the community. IMO that's what killed it.
(Score: 3, Funny) by elf on Tuesday July 08 2014, @08:02PM
The Wheel of Time turns, and "Languages" come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again (The Wheel of Time's opening line is totally applicable to programming languages too!)
If a new language is going to come and stay its going to have to fill a new gap so that there is sufficient need for a large part of the developer community to take it up.
D is pretty (I guess!...not an expert really), but I don't think its going to go anywhere because it hasn't already. People may try it (Like Facebook is) but it needs a lot more momentum to be relevant for. Niche languages have a place but D is too close to C/C++ family to be in that category.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @08:32PM
I've actually been programming in D for a while now (just for side projects, etc). It really is a powerful language. It can feel a little like java, but if necessary, you can use structs, inline ASM, and anything else from C. It also has some other nice features. I love D's implementation of dynamic arrays and implicit associative arrays. The language itself isn't new, but it recently has been getting a lot more focused as the standard library replaces tango, and gcc for D is starting to work really well.
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Tuesday July 08 2014, @09:28PM
Surely Dennis Ritchie has patent & trademark & copyright protection for naming a new language using the next letter in the alphabet after the name of an existing language?
(In case anyone doesn't know, C [wikipedia.org] was named after B [wikipedia.org].)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 09 2014, @12:12AM
Hurr hurr. Nice "joke" there, Carlos Mencia.
(Score: 2) by yellowantphil on Wednesday July 09 2014, @01:44AM
Sure, but the next letter after C is P [wikipedia.org]. But it looks like no one wanted to name their language that.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Wednesday July 09 2014, @09:49AM
Yeah, I've been waiting for the "P" programming language for decades. Instead, we got C++ and D.
(Score: 2) by EvilJim on Wednesday July 09 2014, @12:39AM
funny, I've never heard chicks blaming the beer for not liking 'the D' but the other way round... plenty.
(Score: 1) by In hydraulis on Wednesday July 09 2014, @02:53AM
A couple of years ago I came across a delightful little gem, one of those little snippets of online discussion that you never forget.
Try Dlang's forum [slashdot.org]
Yes, I'm linking to the scary site. Irrespective, D's merits speak for themselves here.