Spreading the word about D

Nick Sabalausky a at a.a
Sun Jun 22 02:39:43 PDT 2008


"Clay Smith" <clayasaurus at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:g3jrs4$402$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Couldn't find a specific thread devoted to this topic, so started.
>
> What do you think is the best way to promote D?
>
> Here are some ideas I already know about and have seen used successfully.
>
> 1. Articles - Write D articles and post on digg/reddit
> 2. Tutorials - Teach D newcomers how to use D
> 3. Libraries - Write a library for D / help out an existing D library
>
> Here is a link that is also relevant to the subject: 
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/howto-promote.html
>
> I'm wondering, what are all the awesome, zany, weird, or unique ways you 
> can think of to promote the D language? Did I cover everything? Are there 
> more effective ways of promoting the language?
>

I agree with all of the "libraries" stuff said before. But I'd also add a 
couple other things:

It's been brought up before, but the official webpage needs to be maintained 
better, particularly from the perspective of a D newbie.  Don't get me 
wrong, this isn't an attack on Walter's web work or anything. It's just that 
D has all this good stuff, like Wiki4D, Chris's snapshots, DFL, etc, but no 
ones going to be finding these things unless they actually commit the time 
amd effort to really dig around the scene and stumble upon them.

Think about it this way: If a person hears about "this cool new D language" 
and decides they want to know more about it, where are they going to go? 
They're going to go find the official D site. (Maybe it's just me, but if I 
want to learn about a language, finding the official site would be my first 
step.) But then they get there and see these outdated pages about the major 
projects and sites for D, and if they stumble upon, for instance, Chris's D 
Snapshots and DSource instead of Elephant and the crappy newsgroup 
web-interface, well then that's just by pure luck rather than design.

Which brings up another thing. Newsgroups aren't very inviting. If Johnny 
Newbie goes to site "BB" and sees a well-designed web-based message board, 
and goes to site "CC" and sees "here's the server and group name for our 
newsgroup" (interestingly, I can't even seem to find the page that says that 
right now - just direct links into the not-very-good web-reader) or even 
worse: a mailing list, then he's gonna be a lot more likely to join in on 
community "BB". I know I would. So...I'm not saying we should switch from 
newsgoups to a message board. I'm just saying, if we're going to stick with 
newsgroups, then getting a better web-interface should be a priority. 





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