An idea for commercial support for D

[Zach the Mystic via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 12 January 2015 at 05:02:36 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> 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'm saying that assembling and funding such a team will require 
some business genius at this point. Maybe Sociomantic will 
provide, a couple years from now, when Dicebot and others are 
finished porting their codebase? But seriously, let's keep the 
question simple. How do you get to that 10-20 dev team? Who wants 
D that bad, and is willing to suffer the capital investment? I 
don't want to sound negative, but it strikes me as a *really* 
hard sell.

>> 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.

A newbie goes to the front page of dlang.org, tries D and has the 
kind of experience Manu recently lamented with his own team. 
Modern convenience? It's false advertising. It's not knowing who 
you are. It doesn't how matter much anybody *wants* D to be 
convenient. Modern convenience would be a gamer changer, 
absolutely, if we had it. But it's about infrastructure - that's 
what convenience *is*. Convenience is not about core product. 
What the slogan is saying is completely different from what D's 
leaders think it's saying. It's saying that D is for language 
geeks who know how to bypass all lack of modern convenience. It's 
saying that D is for people who think convenience is only about 
language and not infrastructure, documentation, and tooling, i.e. 
language geeks - people who love to try new languages and will 
put up with lack of everything else, etc. - perhaps 10% of 
programmers. I'm not saying D really *is* for language geeks. I'm 
saying that's what D is *saying* it is, *without even knowing it*.

Convenience, to me, is one-click downloading from the home page, 
one click installation, and full IDE support akin to what Apple, 
Microsoft and any other behemoth has done for their language. The 
language has nothing to do with it. D can't even remotely compete 
with these languages in terms of convenience. It needs a new 
slogan, and it can't get one until it knows what it is. Here's a 
suggestion: "A Language for Programmers". It would obviously need 
to be vetted by the big wigs, but from my perspective, it's 
already a real brand without any extra work. I wonder if they'll 
agree with me?