D User Survey

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)]

On 12/08/2017 05:53 AM, Chris wrote:
> 
> Yep. D seems to be quite popular in Europe. I wonder why that is, given 
> that it originated in the USA and people in the States are more open to 
> new technologies. What were the technical and social factors at work 
> here? Maybe D wasn't fancy enough to be taken seriously in the USA and 
> maybe people from outside the USA (not only in Europe) looked at it and 
> said "Hold on, that's something interesting...and we can contribute to 
> it." D certainly struck a chord with many programmers around the globe, 
> but what is it exactly? (Please no jokes about D major or D minor chords 
> now ;)

Speaking as a US citizen, it's long been my observation that americans 
(and I only mean collectively, of course, it's difficult to generalize 
down to individuals since that varies greatly) tend to be far more 
conservative than one would assume them to be.

Just as one example: The various genres of electronic music. Always 
succeeded far better in europe than they ever did the US. Americans 
would hear it and just bitch about "soulless", "doesn't require musical 
talent" and other such [nonsence]. But turn on (for example) BBC's Top 
Gear and they had recognizable Prodigy, Crystal Method, etc all over the 
place. And heck, most of Fluke's catalog isn't even available in the US. 
That sort of stuff just doesn't sell very well over here. Americans like 
their "three main acoustic cords" and steady simple 4/4 beats.

Even "silicon vally" isn't quite so much "open to new technology" as it 
is driven primarily by buzz and popularity.

And then there's the last presidential election, which, and I don't mean 
this to be snarky, just honest observation: it clearly demonstrated 
there's far more white tra...*cough*...umm..."ultra-conservatives" here 
than anyone ever thought.

 From what I hear, we're one of the few remaining industrialized nations 
that has capital punishment. Whether that's good/bad is completely 
beside the point here, the point being: Either way, it's undeniably 
conservative.

Despite perhaps tipping my hand a bit, I really don't mean any of that 
as ranting at all, just illustrating that it DOES make sense that europe 
would be more open to D than the US:

Because the US *is* paradoxically much more conservative than one would 
expect from a relatively young country that produces as much software 
and electronics as it does. Whether that conservativeness is 
good/bad/other is open to opinion, but either way, it is what it is, and 
I think D's higher rate of success elsewhere can be traced to that.