Yeah, almost all the time its the inclination of an individual towards a new language that becomes the driving factor of migration rather than the actual shortcoming of current language.
It's much easier for the inclination of an [a single] individual to be due to the perception of [just a single] individual, than if the impetus is a team-level inclination.
I've worked on projects where people had gripes about the codebase and/or language, but they often couldn't agree on which language to move to. So a single person taking over based on their own preference is either a bug or a feature: as a bug, it's ignoring everyone else's preferences and disagreements, and possibly moving to something the team is even less happy with. As a feature, it's making a decision instead of endlessly trying to find a perfect decision, and at least ending up somewhere better off than before.
In this case, it sounds like it could be the positive sort of change if only because they were starting from a basically-dead language. It sounds like without that single person's initial effort, they may have not started any effort to migrate to anything.
But this gives me major pause: "My colleagues will continue to develop in Extended Pascal as usual, and once my transpiler is able to translate all or almost all of it, we will make the switch to D overnight." I'd love to fast-forward to see what happens the days after that... and how long that takes to get to, for that matter!
I see mostly imaginary. As a back end systems guy for over 20 years, I deal with guys all the time wanting to introduce new tools into the mix that add zero value. There is a reason why *nix tools are still around. There is nothing that Python can do better than awk for grabbing data columns and piping them into some other tool.
There is a reason why COBOL still exists, for example, what with its ability to ensure accuracy out to 38 digits. Nothing else comes close w/o tons of extra crap libraries, questionable code mangling, and TRUST. Banks trust COBOL because it has an almost 60-year history of trust.
When kids get all shiny-eyed over golang or Rust or any other "new" language or tool and think it would be a good fit in the financial arena, I start to get a little nervous.
You never said "C" but perhaps you think there is "a reason" why C still exists too. The only reason ineffective tools like C exist is because there are people at the other extreme from those kids: Not take any risk but stick with tried and wrong tools.
Huge pool of programmers. Huge pool of libraries. Tons of existing code that should continue to run. Excellent documentation. Very fast compilers. Debuggers and profilers a plenty. Top notch vendor support. Choices of IDEs. Works great in embedded. Predictable.
The alternatives being what, e.g. Rust, a 5 year old language with a single implementation that still tries to find its place, and brings extra baggage to the table?
>Not take any risk but stick with tried and wrong tools.
Engineers don't take risks. You wouldn't want risks in the people building your bridges and planes, why would you want in your OSes and network infrastructure?
C still has it's place. It's not glamorous, but it works. COBOL has no decent replacements. Yet. Some have tried. Almost all have failed. Old does not mean useless. If it works, then it's not wrong.
I guess you need to inform yourself about migration projects that use those products to bring COBOL codebases to modern platforms, where new features are then written in Java/.NET languages, while the old working code is left as is.
