D reaches 1000 questions on stackoverflow

[Andre Artus]

On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 02:30:42 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 14, 2013 22:56:30 Andre Artus wrote:
>> As with many things it depends on what you want to achieve.
>> Answering on SO is as much about establishing awareness as it 
>> is
>> about answering the question. For a newcomer to D StackOverflow
>> may be their first port of call, if questions go unanswered, or
>> are answered after long delays, then the likelihood of the 
>> person
>> persisting with D is diminished.
>
> I answer questions on SO all the time, but I rarely ask 
> anything there, and I
> never ask anything D-related there. Of course, if my question 
> is D-related,
> I'm much more likely to _have_ to ask my question here to get a 
> good answer
> anyway just based on how many people would even know the 
> answer, simply
> because I know enough that anything I asked would be much more 
> likely to be
> esoteric and/or require in-depth knowledge. The experts are all 
> here, and only
> a small portion of them are on SO.
>
> In any case, I'd say that in general, asking your question on 
> SO gives it more
> visibility to those outside of the core D community, but you're 
> more likely to
> get a good answer here than there, because there are more 
> people here, and
> this is where the experts are.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

I agree with every point you've made here. If I had a D related 
question I would not head for SO first. I have found a lot in the 
D forums without actually having to ask the questions myself. But 
it does not do much for D's exposure.

Evangelizing takes planning and effort. Technical merit is 
unfortunately insufficient to guarantee success in the 
marketplace of ideas. I have known about D for quite some time, 
but did not put too much effort into it until recently. It's when 
I stumbled across the DConf2013 videos that I realized that there 
is some serious legs under D. The quality of the presentations 
(in terms of content over glitz) exceeded that of many similar 
conferences I've seen.

Languages like Ruby, Python, PHP, R, etc. do not have the buzz 
they do because of inherent technical merit, but perhaps in spite 
of thereof. Each has some killer framework compelling you to 
adopt the language in order to benefit from it, and people 
putting serious effort into evangelizing and lowering the 
barriers.

I see there is a thread going on creating D GUI framework, I 
think that would be a major step towards lowering the barriers. 
It needs to be part of a "batteries included" set-up for D. So 
you can download D and run your Hello World GUI app in under 10 
minutes. Not spend half the day searching for mostly abandoned 
efforts and then spending the rest of the day compiling the C/C++ 
dependencies only later to find that you have been sucked into 
the 7th layer of Dependency Hell. While modern C++ has become a 
lot less unpleasant it is still unpleasant; someone new to D 
should never have to run a C/C++ compiler for any reason other 
than to compare compilation time (with a big fat grin on their 
dial for choosing D).