D downloads

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Sunday, 24 December 2017 at 12:25:49 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
wrote:
> On Saturday, 23 December 2017 at 21:04:52 UTC, Laeeth Isharc 
> wrote:
>> http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png
>>
>> Bad data, one off spike, or something else?
>
> Perdon my skepticism, but there is a higher chance that a new 
> web crawler is downloading DMD multiple times - that isn't 
> filtered out by the script - rather than users being suddenly 
> three times as many.

We don't know until we study the data (which should be simple to 
do if someone is curious and has access to it).  Social phenomena 
are very strange, much stranger than economists and other 
students of social data recognise.  I looked at that chart 
recently, and thought explosive.  I didn't expect to see that 
kind of spike.  (It's supposed to be a 28-day moving average - is 
that right?)  In a market that spikes due to noise trades it's 
not that uncommon for it to head there for real a little while 
later in a less ephemeral way...  Maybe non-traded social 
phenomena are completely different, but they might be more 
similar to market phenomena than people think.  So, yes, the 
spike is probably in part noise but look at the broader context.  
People are not very good at understanding at a deep level the 
implications of compound growth, sustained over time.

I didn't get involved with D because I thought it would become 
popular, but I've been saying since 2014 that language advocates 
are pushing at an open door because external conditions are 
changing in the direction where what D offers becomes more useful 
to a wider audience. William Gibson had a character observe that 
the future is already here, just unevenly distributed.  And I 
think that's the case with adoption of D (the problems that early 
adopters face, and that recognise they face, for which D is a 
good and practical answer for them will become more prevalent 
over time).

Digicash was launched in 1989.  The cypherpunks list began in 
1992.  I remember reading a message by Tim May a few months after 
the list began setting out the reasons why cryptocurrency would 
succeed, and he was obviously right.  But it took a very long 
time for it to gain traction.  (The first person to receive 
Bitcoin was Hal Finney, a prominent member of both the extropians 
and cypherpunks lists).  One could have reasonably said for many 
years 'cryptocurrency hasn't taken off, so it won't'.  But that's 
not how social phenomena develop.  They build slowly in the 
beginning, and there are certain thresholds of perception that 
need to be surpassed for a broader audience to start to get it.  
And things only break out into the world when external conditions 
are ripe - but those earlier years are very important for the 
thing to reach a level of maturity and refinement that simply 
could not have been possible had popularity been achieved earlier.

It's not true that there are no jobs in D - we are hiring at 
least four people (depending on the people likely to be working 
at least partly in D), as are others - but maybe it was important 
for the development of the language that in the beginning there 
weren't jobs.  Because the only people that were involved were 
those that were intrinsically motivated, and that's important to 
get to technical excellence...


Laeeth.