GSoC Mentor Summit Observations and D Marketing

[Brad Roberts]

On Mon, 24 Oct 2011, Walter Bright wrote:

> On 10/24/2011 5:42 PM, dsimcha wrote:
> > I got the impression that D is not being used partly because of the obvious
> > reasons (lack of libraries, legacy code in other languages) but also partly
> > because most people, even if they've heard of it, don't know what its most
> > important features/benefits are. I think that we need to develop a short,
> > memorable "elevator speech" version of its selling points, even if we ignore
> > some substantial areas in doing so. The one I used was basically
> > "compile-time
> > metaprogramming on steroids, static if, CTFE, string mixins, see
> > std.algorithm,
> > std.range and std.parallelism for examples".
> 
> You're right, I've been recently wrestling with the elevator pitch thing for
> D. I know we need one. Bartosz has suggested "Systems programming safe and
> easy."

That's not a pitch, that's a slogan or a catch phrase.  It might be enough 
to get the listener to invite the pitch.

A pitch needs to be longer and more informative.  You've got 20-30 seconds 
to convince the person to look deeper.  It's enough to list a couple 
important points.  Top three reasons it's worth looking at closer.. 
something along those lines.