Andrei's list of barriers to D adoption

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Mon, 2016-06-06 at 13:19 -0700, David Soria Parra via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
> 
[…]
> Go is the perfect example here. The traction that Go has and D has
> not doesn't come from GC
> or not, it comes from accessible documentation, easy installation,
> good libraries and community support.

I think it is slightly more complicated than that, but these are the
major issues. Go arrived with an easy way for early adopters to try it
out (clone the repository and type make) which cause some of them to
start writing libraries, which caused more people to try it out which
caused documentation to be written. Then came the debates about how
crap the system was which eventually led to the go command, etc. So it
was about rapid evolution and acreting more and more people creating an
active and constructive community. But in the background was that fact
that the core team were fully funded to work on the project full time.
This cannot be underestimated in the rapid rise of Go. Go evolution
over the 7 years it has been public has had many rough rides, not
dissimilar to D, but always there was the team of full-time people.
This is what D is missing, and is unlikely to have in the foreseeable
future.

Lessons can be learned not only from Go, but also Groovy, which has
seen all forms of activity in it's 13 years.  

Swift will I suspect go the same way as Go exactly because it is funded
and has a hype behind it. Swift also has the ready made market of being
the anointed replacement for Objective-C(++) for iOS applications
development.

> New developerse will give a language 10-60min max, if it is
> compelling and you feel productive and
> decently fast then you are set.

I am not sure this is entirely the case, but yes there is a distinct
element of soundbyte first impressions. There is a clear relationship
between language age and expectation of sophistication of the
installation and development support. Go got away with zero support
initially because it was so young, and it got the early adopters in to
do the leg work of enabling the sophisticated set ups no there.

Without active, full time development of Eclipse/DDT, IntelliJ IDEA,
CLion, etc. support for D, D will always be seen as an old language
with no sophisticated tooling.

The organizations currently using D could easily chip in and make this
full time activity happen, and whilst a cost should bear fruit in
better development for themselves. 

> sure there are outlines where you watn to replace C++ or C, but those
> areas are much harder to get
> traction on due to dependencies in the existing architecture and a
> (correctly so) risk-aversity.

So don't focus on them for D traction, let them come in their own time.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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