Maybe D is right about GC after all !

[Russel Winder]

On Wed, 2017-12-27 at 16:57 +0000, Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
> 
[…]
> 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.

Witness that it is likely that Kotlin will take over from Java as the
primary language of Android application development.

In the end this is that the programming language offers something very
significant to allow a change in the extant market leader.

> 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.

But the challenger must offer something that the extant market leader
does not that the majority of the people in the game value. Without an
obvious an unassailable value there will be no change in market leader.

> 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!

Experimentally it takes 10 years for a language to achieve status these
days. Exceptions prove the rule!

The challenger has to offer something that the community value. Rust
offers memory safety over C. D offers "better C++". This is the wrong
message to achieve traction. D must offer something that C++ does not
offer.

> 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).

But as of 2017-03-30 I have no hidden agenda, i.e. I retired. :-) This
mjeans I am just doing what I want, which currently is organising ACCU
conference, organising DevoxxUK conferences and programming DVB-T and
DAB clients. D has failed to get traction at ACCU, has no chance at all
at DevoxxUK, and has lost to Rust in DVB-T and DAB applications.

-- 
Russel.
==========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk
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