GSoC Mentor Summit Observations and D Marketing

[Caligo]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 7:42 PM, dsimcha <dsimcha at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I wanted to thank the D community for getting us involved in GSoC and
> giving me the opportunity to attend the Mentor Summit, which was this
> weekend.  I was pleasantly surprised to find out that most hardcore
> programmers have at least heard of D by now, at least if the Mentor Summit
> was a representative sample of hardcore programmers that I had never talked
> to before.  There seemed to be substantial interest in it from the informal
> conversations I had over meals, etc.
>
> 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".
>
> I was also frequently asked about D's compatibility with C and C++.  The
> impression I get is that we would do well to highlight our ease of
> integrating with C more in our marketing, especially now that we have
> Deimos.
>
> BTW, Fawzi Mohammed was also at the Mentor Summit and may have additional
> comments.  I'd be interested to see him weigh in on this thread.
>

I wasn't there at the Mentor Summit, but I would consider myself a hardcore
programmer.  I discovered D in early 2008, and I was immediately impressed.

Many other programmers I've interacted with, including my coworkers, are
aware of D, but the main reason they've not taken it seriously is not lack
of libraries or legacy code in other languages, but lack of stable
compilers.  It is the same reason why I haven't been able to take D
seriously.  This year alone I started two projects in D, but I had to put
them on hold because of bugs in DMD.  Yes, I aware it's getting better, but
it's still not there yet.

I personally don't think compatibility with C and C++ (specially C++) is
going to matter much, specially in the long run.  D offers so much over C++
that I think many of the most popular libraries will be rewritten in D.  But
that's just me, and I could be wrong.  For example, about a decade ago the
men responsible for Qt decided to avoid using C++ templates mainly because
of lack of compiler support.  Imagine if Qt was rewritten in D! hmm...
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