Indicators and traction…

[Shammah Chancellor via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 12:19:48 UTC, Russel Winder 
wrote:
> Having just done a session at PyConUK 2015 aimed at weaning 
> people of
> pure Python and into polyglot – Python with (C++|D|Chapel) 
> (there
> should have been a Rust bit but…) – and as people probably 
> heard the D
> bit was a bit embarrassing for me, I got some interesting 
> comments
> during the rest of the conference.
>
> The most important can be paraphrased as "I had heard of D but 
> as it was getting no traction, I never looked at it again."
>
> This would seem to indicate that D really does need to have a 
> marketing campaign to show it does have traction and isn't just 
> a little ghetto as so many languages end up in. D's forays into 
> AAA games, finance, etc. all need to get permanent presence. In 
> this respect, Reddit is (almost) an irrelevance: bulk 
> perception is unaffected by Reddit, most programmers do not 
> even look at it, let alone follow it. It would be nice if Tiobe 
> and the like were an irrelevance, but that is less so.
>
> Having active regional groups is a first important factor, and 
> that is happening, though perhaps less than would be good. 
> Having lots of projects on GitHub (and BitBucket) that get 
> noticed. Clearly everyone is fighting JavaScript, but that is 
> not an issue for D per se. Go, Rust, C++, C are the "enemy".
>
> Maybe discuss this a bit at the coming London D Meeting – which 
> sadly clashes with the London Go Meeting…


Honestly, the biggest thing that would get some D traction is 
people writing developer tools in it.  I've been working on some 
release tooling in D to snapshot sets of repositories for later 
checkout and to generate changelogs from commit messages somewhat 
like dpkg-dch.

-Shammah