What can the community do to help D?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 10/23/10 13:28 CDT, Peter Alexander wrote:
> On 23/10/10 6:27 PM, Kagamin wrote:
>> D needs good docs. See for example this question
>> http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D.learn&article_id=22405
>>
>
> I agree that better documentation would be nice, but really the
> documentation needs to be updated on the main page, and that's not
> something that the community at large can do (unless I'm mistaken).

You could definitely influence that. We're having sort of catch-22. 
Consider you know for a fact you could write a superb tutorial on D, 
good to be on the first page of d-programming-language.org. But you are 
deadlocked by the spectrum of working in vain, so you end up not writing it.

Regarding the original question, it all depends on the level at which 
one wants to engage. We have some simple things that keep on falling 
towards the tail of the to-do list. In my experience, a strong proponent 
is the best recipe for success.

1. Quality articles, blog entries, experience reports always help. 
There's a good amount of solid knowledge around this group and some 
posts here are of very good quality - almost good to plop in a 
compelling blog and close to a real article. When being comfortable and 
appreciated within the community, it's very easy to forget that the 
outreach of newsgroups posts is minuscule and ephemeral. I've noticed 
that there are blips in TDPL's Amazon's rating whenever something about 
D gets out there (reddit, article, popular blog etc.) There is no 
correlation with even very fruitful and interesting newsgroup activity. 
Statistically, nobody knows about this group :o).

2. Code (whole applications, library submissions). Nothing adds to a 
language's credibility more than code samples, libraries, entire 
applications. Strong proposals for Phobos are still rare, though the 
situation is improving considerably.


Thanks,

Andrei