Lost a new commercial user this week :(

[Dicebot via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 17 December 2014 at 08:30:59 UTC, Manu via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> Here is exactly your problem - trying to do a web development 
>> on Windows :P
>> Really I have never understood that counter-productive 
>> obsession with a
>> habit that makes people differentiate development environments 
>> and
>> production environments so much. You aren't going to use 
>> Windows servers,
>> are you?
>
> Okay, you go and tell the CEO of my company that we're 
> switching environments!
> We'll need all new software licensing, we'll need to re-jig the
> company server and IT infrastructure, we'll also need to 
> retrain ALL
> the staff.
> Then we'll have to deal with the vast majority of staff who hate
> linux, and refuse to work in that environment.

I expect you to go and do that. Well, actually, in any reasonable 
company I'd expect environment to be defined at the initial 
design document stage and always be the one fitting for the 
specific product. Choosing inferior tools (assuming those are 
proved inferior) simply because of some bullshit policies is just 
ridiculous.

This is exactly what happened on one of my old jobs - upon 
encountering some pressure from company management team leads 
just went there and said "Stop messing with our tool choices if 
you want this project live. Or start looking for new 
programmers." Worked like magic.

It is not like I think that web servers shouldn't work on Windows 
- it is just realistic to expect much less effort to be put into 
bringing it to production quality. And impractical to lobby for 
putting more (limited) effort there. Same applies to most server 
technology out there per my experience.

> Actually, I recommended it because I had had a positive 
> experience
> with vibe.d in the past. It seemed pretty solid.
> Gotta start somewhere. I've had success promoting D to 
> commercial
> users in the past.

Promoting to commercial users is indeed possible but one needs to 
explain risks and trade-offs straight. I wonder though how you 
have not noticed debugger issues before if there was some 
positive experience. There was nothing to debug? :)

>> Idea that any D project can compete with node.js in "easy to 
>> jump in" domain
>> is absolutely ridiculous. Attempting this is just dooming 
>> yourself to fail.
>> Same is trying to advertise it is stable mature language - 
>> reality is it is
>> simply not true and people will find out it sooner or later.
>
> Sorry, maybe it wasn't clear, we never tried it out against 
> node.js,
> we tried it first, on my recommendation.
> When it was rejected, someone else suggested to look at 
> node.js. We
> looked at that, it just worked.

I mean that if "it just worked" was enough to make decision to 
use the node.js, then you didn't have any critical requirements 
that it fails to address (otherwise you would have looked for 
those first). Which means that pretty much any framework out 
there was suitable and ease of use was only truly important 
criteria.

Interesting part starts when you say "yeah, it have just worked, 
BUT.." and start evaluating if ease development will be enough to 
compensate for certain architectural issues in the long term 
(budget-wise).

> We didn't want any of those things from .js though. We're all
> low-level/native coders.
> We don't have time to debug language and library issues though. 
> If we
> didn't have tooling/library issues, we would have been 
> perfectly happy
> writing whatever code we needed to do our job.

If developer time is more expensive than server time in your 
project, most likely there is no point in going for native 
languages even if you prefer those. Otherwise debugger issues 
and/or necessity to switch the OS environment would not have 
stopped you.

>> If there ever appears a game development company / community 
>> interested in
>> _investing_ into programming language that would be totally 
>> different story
>> but also irrelevant to enterprise culture you refer to.
>
> So, in your world, D is a language for nerds (linux nerds at 
> that!),
> and not for serious productivity by enterprise?
> Give me a break!

Of course it is language for nerds. Do you see a paid developer 
team working on D? At least ONE paid developer? Maybe someone of 
existing commercial users pays for adding tools / features? It is 
not a product, it is not funded and can't be anything but 
language for nerds unless YOU start paying for the change.

Which doesn't mean that it can be very productive language for 
serious projects. Nerds are pretty good at doing projects when 
there is no one from enterprise to create trouble. I think 
Sociomantic has proven quite strongly that such an attitude can 
work for successful business.

To start using D effectively in production one needs to stop 
considering himself a customer. This is absolutely critical.