two points

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce]

I'm not going to fill out the questionnaire because I'm not at a 
company and have not tried Mir, but two points about what Nick 
and Mike wrote.

On Wednesday, 8 February 2017 at 20:40:48 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
wrote:
> Coercion (and perceived coercion[1] for that matter) makes 
> technologies popular far more than any other factor. The 
> computing sector is NOT a meritocracy, not by a longshot. That 
> right there is D's #1 biggest marketing flaw, period. If you 
> nail that coercion part, it doesn't matter HOW badly you do on 
> any other technical or marketing aspect. Been proven time and 
> time again. And if you DON'T have that coercion, you face an 
> uphill battle no matter how good you do on technical and 
> marketing fronts. Also been proven time and time again.

I agree that "coercion," or more accurately the tyranny of the 
default, is the dominant factor in language popularity even 
today, but you're reaching when you apply that to web frameworks 
too.  As you admit, rails didn't become as big as it might have 
because there were quickly many other web frameworks, ie 
languages and frameworks on the server are very competitive and 
that market is very fragmented, though PHP is likely the biggest.

D's problem on the client is that the popular platforms are still 
very much tied to certain favored languages:

iOS - ObjC and Swift
Android non-game apps - Java
Android games - C/C++
Windows - C# or C++
Web - Javascript

Three of the four major client platforms all allow other 
languages (with the fourth starting to with WebAssembly), but 
you're often fighting the tide if you choose a non-default 
language so most don't bother.

We can make the dev experience more pleasant on those platforms, 
as I believe has happened now that we support the MS toolchain on 
Windows, but D is unlikely to become popular without a killer app 
that demonstrates its suitability.  That's not coercion, but 
something we can actually control.

On Thursday, 9 February 2017 at 00:30:53 UTC, Mike wrote:
> I think the D leadership are too busy addressing broader issues 
> with the language at the moment, so this specific case is just 
> not a high priority.  Also, if it's not a priority to the them, 
> then anyone that does attempt to work on it will just suffer an 
> eternity in pull request purgatory.
>
> So, I would not recommend it as a project for anyone until the 
> D leadership decides to get involved.

I think this misunderstands how open source works: the whole 
point is that you don't need anybody's permission to go do this.  
Walter and Andrei, or any other OSS core team, are much more 
likely to approve something if you have an implementation that 
works well.  Look at Ilya and what happened after he showed them 
Mir.

Now, you may not want to go do this on your own if you believe 
it's a lot of effort, could use a design the core team may not 
approve, and don't want to maintain or develop your own fork 
indefinitely, but that's a lot of "if"s.  I doubt it would be a 
lot of effort to strip D down like this, but I have not looked 
into it.