GSoC Mentor Summit Observations and D Marketing

[Walter Bright]

On 10/24/2011 6:52 PM, Brad Roberts wrote:
> 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.

Right, but you need a headline that's 140 characters or less (tweet size). For 
example, the ipad was "1000 songs in your pocket". The iphone was "reinvention 
of the phone".

> 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.

The 3 keys come next. It has to be more than two, and less than 4. I've been 
toying with:

1. control
2. multi-paradigm
3. robustness

(Yes, I've been reading a book on this!)