Had another 48hr game jam this weekend...

[SomeDude]

On Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 19:44:11 UTC, Brian Schott wrote:
> On Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 18:36:39 UTC, SomeDude wrote:
>> I think at this point, what D needs is a bit of commercial 
>> support from a company like JetBrains or some equivalent. 
>> Maybe there is now an opportunity for founding such a company, 
>> one that would specialize in building professional tools 
>> around the D language. I believe the language and the 
>> compilers are stable enough to grow a serious business around 
>> them. If we compare to what the state of C++ compilers was 
>> before 2000, I believe we are much better off. And that was 
>> just over a decade ago. Who knows what the state of D will be 
>> in 5 years ? So yes, there is a case to be made for growing a 
>> company around pro D tools, and the first company that does it 
>> will grab the whole market.
>
> It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. I'd like to do this, 
> but there would have to be several companies already using D 
> professionally for it to be a viable business model. And for a 
> company to invest in D, they'd probably want the tooling to 
> already exist.

Your concern is legitimate of course, but there has been 
historically many cases where small companies have created a 
market in IT. There is clearly a demand for D tooling even if 
it's not huge right now, so I believe the risk is not as great as 
you think. Of course one needs some good skills to be able to 
come up with usable tools. But when nearly every D newcomer's 
first question is "where are the tools ?", there is a market for 
that.