Python vs D [ was Re: Bartosz about Chapel ]

[Russel Winder]

On Thu, 2011-11-10 at 21:06 -0600, Caligo wrote:
[...]
> That's like going back 20 years and telling Linus "without a properly
> financed and orchestrated marketing campaign to push Linux out there..." ,
> you get my drift.

No I don't, but I think you are trivializing my point by trying to make
it appear spurious.

Linux only really became popular due to distributions such as Red Hat,
Debian, Slackware, etc.  Resources were pumped into them to make them
work.  Not direct financing and marketing but indirect financing and
marketing.  The Red Hat and Debian campaigns have clearly been
successful -- even though Linux has a trivial install base compared to
Windows on client machines, it dominates on server machines (and is the
only OS on my equipment of any sort). 

> Money and marketing are important, specially when you are developing
> a proprietary system.  You can have a shit product, but with enough
> marketing you can make people believe it's not shit; Microsoft has done it,
> same with Sun and Java.

I won't disagree with you on Microsoft.  Nor in it's latter days Sun's
business strategy. Java is a different matter.  It has problems, but it
has undoubtedly revolutionized software.  Java is a waning language just
now, though Java 8, if it comes soon and gets it right, could revitalize
it.  But Java per se is not real issue, it is the JVM that is a core
product of future software.  Groovy, Scala, JRuby, Jython, Clojure,
Fantom, Ceylon, Mirah, Kotlin,...  The JVM-sphere is a melting pot of
enthusiasm, gentle (but sometimes otherwise, sadly) competition, and a
huge and positive desire to succeed.  Backed up by a lot of direct and
indirect resourcing that allows things to happen without the stress of
relying only on volunteer labour.

Clearly there are static and dynamic languages here.  For the dynamic
languages the main thrust of marketing is the line "more expressive than
Java, interworks with Java and the libraries, gives you a runtime MOP".
For the static languages the general line is "less verbose than Java,
more expressive than Java, interworks with Java, can gradually replace
Java".

The core strategy has not been to argue for throwing Java out but much
more for keeping what there is but side-lining Java as a future
development language.

Turning to the Fortran, C, Go, C++, D end of things, all arguments are
"replace do not interwork".  Go is the classic example of this.  Trying
to use C written libraries from Go is painful, so there is a huge effort
to effectively replace all the C and C++ infrastructure code out there
with Go infrastructure.  With the direct and indirect resources from
Google and others this is happening, and at a phenomenal rate.

Although D can interwork with C and C++ written libraries, the
perception of those out there who are not directly part of the D
community, is the D is a language for revolutionary replacement of C++
rather than evolutionary replacement of C++, i.e. C++/D is an one or the
other choice.  No matter how wrong this might be, it is the perception,
and that is what matters.

> If D fails, it's not because of lack of money or marketing, but because of
> lack of a healthy and growing community.  A healthy community is what all
> successful open source projects have in common.  Moving to Github was a
> step in the right direction, but it's not enough, and the people in charge
> don't seem to have a clue as to how to build a community.  How many new
> developers have joined the development of D/Phobos in the last year?  I bet
> very few.  They haven't even fixed the link to that old site, and it's been
> like that for far too long.

I say it is not that black and white.  A healthy, vibrant, expanding
community is a precursor to success.  Ruby saw this, Groovy saw this.
You also need a successful showcase (I refuse to use the term "killer
app" as that has all the wrong connotations).  Ruby had Rails, Groovy
had Grails.  The you need the non-volunteer resources to continue the
drive into the mainstream.  Ruby attracted the entrepreneurs, spawned
GitHub, Heroku, etc.  Groovy attracted SpringSource, BSkyB, and got
recognized as core enterprise toolkit.

Only when the resources got put into things did the phase change from
peripheral to core happen.  D is currently a potential waiting for a
resourcing.  It needs a showcase.

> Where is "D/Phobos Developer's Guide" page?

Perhaps more importantly, where is the material showing C and C++
programmers how they can start writing D in their current systems and
slowly move to D in an incremental way to great benefit in development
speed with no loss of performance?

Scala, Ceylon, Kotlin, etc. will succeed exactly because they offer
things not in Java and yet systems can be written in a mix of any and
all of the languages.

Groovy, JRuby, Jython, etc. are succeeding because they offer forms of
expression not available in static langauges and yet can interwork with
all the languages that sit on the JVM.

D has to do this with C and C++ so as to be able to be used in an
incremental and insurgent way.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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