Indicators and traction…

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 12:19:48 UTC, Russel Winder 
wrote:

> 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."

Sad but true. Developers want better tools, but don't even look 
at them, unless you hype them. No wonder mediocre but well-hyped 
languages could be so successful. The sad thing is that one would 
have thought that developers are a bit wiser than the average 
consumer when it comes to choosing their tools.

> 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".

I wouldn't call them D's "enemies". The difference is that 
languages like Go are designed to get as many users on board as 
possible in order to lock them in and create dependencies (like 
proprietary operating systems, OS X or MS Windows). D's 
philosophy is different, it genuinely wants to offer a good tool 
that everyone can use without trying to lock anyone in. I'm no 
longer sure, if marketing would make a big difference. We're up 
against

a) billions of dollars:
    big corporations (cf. Go) and the Java/C++/C# industry that 
makes millions selling training courses and books etc.
b) the general inertia and herd behavior of people, and to make 
the herd move you need a)