Maybe D is right about GC after all !

Laeeth Isharc laeethnospam at nospam.laeeth.com
Wed Dec 27 16:57:44 UTC 2017


On Sunday, 24 December 2017 at 20:58:51 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Sun, 2017-12-24 at 17:13 +0000, Laeeth Isharc via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> […]
>> 
>> New things grow at the fringes.  See the work of Clayton 
>> Christensen and his book the Innovator's Dilemma.  A head-on 
>> assault is ill-advised.  People looking for salvation are 
>> easier to talk to than those who don't see anything wrong with 
>> what they're doing currently.
>
> Not my experience in the JVM-related community, and to an 
> extent the Python community, at least in the UK. Head on 
> collisions create debate, and get you remembered. The debate 
> generally leads to change, even if not the change initially 
> envisaged. At least the status quo gets perturbed.
>
> Just dealing with the fringes and solving their problems rarely 
> get serious traction. cf. Golo, Gosu, Fantom, Crystal, Pony, 
> all of which solve definite problems but none of which have any 
> serious traction to move programming on.

It's much better to have a monopoly of some niche or set of 
niches and to use energy from success to expand out from there, 
than to have a small market share of an enormous market.  And 
niche in this case is not something simple - it's people who have 
a certain set of kinds of problems and certain capabilities and 
who have the ability to make decisions on merits for them rather 
than primarily social factors.

See Peter Thiel's Zero to One for another expression of the same 
point.

 From a strategic perspective, it's by far better for the 
challenger not to be taken seriously for the longest possible 
time until the moment is ripe, if it's possible to achieve that.

It takes a long time for a programming language to be adopted.  
And the more ambitious the language, perhaps the longer it takes 
to mature and the longer it will be for it to achieve wide 
adoption.  D is a pretty ambitious language!

I can appreciate that if one's business involves teaching people 
a language then this is frustrating.  But I'd suggest taking a 
step back and looking at things from the point of view of the 
language itself, which is an organic creature not wholly under 
the control of its creators.  (See node.js).


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