Indicators and traction…

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 09:48:24 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 23:00:29 UTC, Laeeth Isharc 
> wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 16:22:35 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> I think you are spot on.
>
> I agree. Conventional marketing won't get us far at this stage.

We agree (although the theory of marketing I think points in the 
same direction I described, whether or not that's what people 
understand by marketing).

> Thank you. Nicely put. Mind you, a lot of complaints are not 
> related to the language itself (as others have said), but are 
> secondary issues like IDEs 
> (one-click-debug-compile-run-deploy-go-for-coffee-magic) and 
> libraries, which are logically a step you take _after_ a 
> language has been created.

It's an ecosystem and things co-evolve.

Why do the documentation and IDE options fall short of what many 
newcomers might expect?  Because the community seems to me to be 
comprised of serious programming types, and for such people the 
importance of documentation and IDEs is less than it might be for 
others.  That's a strength of the community, not a weakness, but 
it just means at this time those aren't especially selling points 
of D (although it's improving every year).  At some point the 
dynamics will change and either existing D IDEs will become good 
enough, or someone will be motivated to write one.

> These things do make a difference. At least for the Python 
> crowd. But be prepared that people might attack you saying that 
> with C++ it would be 10-20% faster than D, because D has GC 
> blah blah blah.

Yes, but the reason it takes him an hour today whilst he is 
putting money to work behind this strategy is that the 
alternative to the internal scripting language is C++, and that 
will cost time and money.  Having to make a business case for 
something often means that projects with a high return on 
investment don't get done, or take a long time to be done, 
because of the human factors.

And if you have to wait 3 minutes (remember, this is on my home 
machine with dmd debug mode) or 2.7 minutes, it's not an 
important difference.  Because I still remember what I was 
thinking when I ran the study.  But after an hour I have 
completely forgotten and will be doing something else.

Of course you can scale up to more machines, but the cost of 
adding complexity for a small tool isn't zero, even if the cost 
of raw horsepower is close to zero.


> The amount of random criticism that is thrown at D, confirms, 
> imo, that it is really good, else people wouldn't bother to 
> attack it so passionately. Only really good creations are 
> attacked with a passion - be it in art or technology.

Yes - that's very insightful.  I wonder why that is.


Laeeth.