Is D still alive?

[retard]

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 11:43:37 -0500, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:

> On Fri, 28 Jan 2011 20:16:54 -0500, Walter Bright
> <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> 
>> Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>> I can't buy "enterprise" support,
>>
>> Of course you can!
> 
> No really, I can't afford it ;)
> 
> But seriously, I find it hard to believe that you can buy enterprise
> support for D if it means that you do the work.  There's only one you. 
> So at some point, you might be spread too thin between adding new
> features, posting to this newsgroup, and supporting all enterprise
> customers.
> 
> Any estimate you can give on how many such customers you have?

The fact that the final specification and design rationale of D is 
undocumented and in Walter's head means that no other person can sell 
that kind of deep enterprise support because it's not clear how the 
language should work. The rest of us can only guess. It also means that 
the more Walter spends time on enterprise support, the less he has time 
to work on D. The best for D might be to not buy any support at all. All 
the conferences and events are just distracting D's development.

I think the same applies to Phobos 2.. only Andrei knows the design well 
enough and knows how it's going to change in the future. No matter how 
much time one spends studying D or the ecosystem or how D is used in the 
enterprise world, one simply can't obtain any reasonable level of 
knowledge to become a "certified" authority in this community.

About the enterprise support... I haven't seen any material from Walter 
targeting professional D developers, only advertisements for people who 
have never used D. Maybe the hardcore stuff isn't publicly available.

The commercial language consultancy support I've seen is that consultants 
with 20+ years of enterprise "C++ experience" teach young developers with 
only ~1-5 years of enterprise experience with the platform. Typically 
even the fresh juniors have some experience with the platform (via 
university training) and the in-house seniors with 3+ years of experience 
help them to get more familiar with the platform used in the company. 
It's also very rare to only focus on the language, usually the frameworks 
and toolchain are the major culprits. YMMV of course and the world is 
full of all kinds of bullshit consultancy.