Strategy for Traction

[Abdulhaq]

On Monday, 24 February 2014 at 06:36:33 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Sun, 2014-02-23 at 19:53 +0000, bearophile wrote:
>> Russel Winder:
>> 
>> > Those in the Python side of the game disliked C and C++ co 
>> > much they created abstractions, ending up with NumPy, 
>> > Cython, ShedSkin,
>> 
>> Unfortunately ShedSkin is now essentially dead. And Julia 
>> could replace Python in some usages, because of its 
>> performance.
>
> ShedSkin certainly isn't keeping up with the programme and 
> working with
> Python 3 so I have never tried it.
>
> Julia is a system I keep up with, it is splendid. And there is 
> even now
> a London Julia user group.
>
> User group activity is likely a measure of involvement: Java 
> and JVM
> technology groups have no problem having meetings with 
> attenders. Go
> went from 20 → 120 attenders per month in a year. Python has 
> activity.
> Julia has a new user group.
>
> I suspect D has no user group activity because it is a 10 year 
> old
> language very few people have heard about. It needs a marketing 
> reboot
> so as to be new and exciting and attract people to attend 
> meetings.

I've been mainly working with python at work for the last ten 
years, in aeroengineering. We've built some very large and 
interesting GUI and non-GUI engineering tools. On the back of 
that experience I've looked around for languages that address the 
problems we found (mainly startup speed and lack of static typing 
with tooling around that) and I ended up here with D.

We use numpy, scipy, vtk, Qt and CAD kernel software extensively.

 From my personal perspective I've noticed a really heavy focus 
here on C++ refugees - that's just an observation, not a 
criticism. For instance, there are sometimes questions about what 
to use as a Set. The answer revolves around how only an 
incompetent doesn't pay attention to exactly what sort of set 
they need. However, from a python programmer's perspective we 
just want a Set to hold a dozen objects, I don't care if it takes 
1 nanosecond or 1.5 nanoseconds to run. Set also reads better 
that RedBlackTree etc.

So, I think that D has a lot to offer those wanting to move on 
from python. With that in mind I'd like to see the equivalent of 
numpy/scipy etc. for D. At the moment that's just wishful 
thinking though (IMHO) because it's the people, drive and 
experience to actually build those tools that is required, and 
that's really hard to come by.