An idea for commercial support for D

Joakim via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sun Jan 11 21:02:35 PST 2015


On Sunday, 11 January 2015 at 19:27:15 UTC, Iain Buclaw via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 11 January 2015 at 16:23, Joakim via Digitalmars-d
> <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>> On Sunday, 11 January 2015 at 16:13:01 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>>>>
>>>> There are very few "monopolies" in software, essentially 
>>>> none nowadays.
>>>
>>>
>>> :D :D :D :D :D
>>>
>>> I have not laughed so hard for quite a while. Modern IT 
>>> industry is
>>> absolutely dominated by monopolies / oligopolies.
>>>
>>> Hard to reason with you if this is what you see.
>>
>>
>> You should really try to keep up to date with recent market 
>> share stats:
>>
>> http://www.businessinsider.in/In-Case-You-Dont-Appreciate-How-Fast-The-Windows-Monopoly-Is-Getting-Destroyed-/articleshow/21123434.cms
>
> Why should Monopoly automatically mean Microsoft?  ;-)

It doesn't, it's just the only company he mentioned and the one 
most think of.  If you have another in mind, feel free to mention 
it.

On Monday, 12 January 2015 at 04:17:11 UTC, Zach the Mystic wrote:
> On Sunday, 11 January 2015 at 16:02:59 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> You may be right that nobody else in the _D_ community sees 
>> the value, but engineers are notorious for being ignorant of 
>> business and economics, so nothing unusual if that's the case.
>
> Yeah, it seems to be a big deal. D may end up needing what it 
> doesn't appear to have: some business genius to go along with 
> its language design prowess. The "switching costs" are far too 
> high right now. Even the ideal programming language could only 
> be so much better than what already exists.

I don't know about "genius," simply a small to mid-sized company 
like Embarcadero that's willing to invest into putting 10-20 paid 
devs on producing and selling a polished compiler/runtime/stdlib 
would do.

I disagree that the ideal programming language would "only be so 
much better:" we can do a _lot_ better than C++ and all its 
legacy issues.  D certainly makes a stab at it, but is missing 
good commercial implementations like C++ has.

> I'm not a marketing expert (well, perhaps ipso facto), but I 
> think that in order to prosper in the current climate D needs a 
> better brand. "Modern convenience. Modeling power. Native 
> efficiency."...  isn't good enough. Not to disparage the effort 
> that went into creating that slogan, but for one thing, it's 
> not even honest, insofar as D does not yet provide modern 
> convenience, as Manu Evans has so dishearteningly pointed out. 
> (It's becoming painfully obvious that convenience is absolutely 
> not about language - it's about ecosystem, and D simply doesn't 
> have that yet.)

I don't have a problem with the brand.  D is convenient enough 
for me in terms of features, though I certainly don't push it as 
far as Manu does.  As for the library ecosystem, that's always a 
slog to bootstrap for any new language.

> The most important thing about a brand is that you know who you 
> are. D still doesn't know what it is yet, and so it hasn't 
> found the need to create a brand that matches that identity.

I'd argue that D knows what it is by now, but doesn't know how to 
get it done, ie a volunteer project won't make any headway 
against C++.

>> In any case, D's license allows it, so I'm sure somebody will 
>> try out a hybrid model with a D compiler someday, or D will be 
>> obsoleted by a language that does.
>
> I'm not managing a huge codebase, so I have nothing to lose by 
> sticking with D!

Nor am I, I have no problem tinkering with a hobby language like 
D in my spare time.


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