Indicators and traction…

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 15:47:06 UTC, Chris wrote:
> 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.

Most developers are either not interested in choosing their own 
tools, or know they're not smart enough to do so.  Instead, they 
rely on the same mechanism as most consumers, social proof, ie do 
what everybody else in your field is doing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof

D is still in the innovators and early adopters stage of the tech 
adoption lifecycle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle

To break out to an early majority, D will have to prove itself, 
ie the innovators and early adopters have to show empirically 
that it is working better for them and allowing them to do more.  
Sociomantic would be a good success story to point at, though the 
fact they're still on D1 hurts that story.

This is why I keep saying D needs a killer app to break out and 
garner attention so it spreads wider.  An example would be how 
the success of Whatsapp brought more attention to Erlang.  
Barring that, a bunch of nice libraries on dub that get attention 
might work too.  One is a home run, the other is a bunch of 
singles, to use a baseball analogy.

I'm hoping that once D is on mobile, it will prove fertile 
terrain and flourish there.  I think more could be done to 
publicize it as a good language on the server, that scales well 
and is much easier to develop with.

There will need to be a paid toolchain at some point, to spur 
more development and more manpower on sanding down the rough 
edges of the tools.  That's a chicken-and-egg situation right 
now, as there might not be enough devs and businesses making 
money off D to pay for such tools yet.