D future ...

rikki cattermole via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sun Feb 19 04:37:02 PST 2017


On 20/02/2017 1:25 AM, timmyjose wrote:
> On Tuesday, 20 December 2016 at 15:42:16 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 20 December 2016 at 15:17:56 UTC, Benjiro wrote:
>>> I do not recall seeing on the C++ and other forums this constant
>>> attitude from fix it yourselves or put it in the libraries or ... Its
>>> mostly on the smaller languages where they lack people. And at the
>>> same time, that is a very scary though for companies who want to use
>>> a language.
>>
>> I think it's important to be realistic. One of D's limitations is that
>> it does not have the money of Microsoft or Intel behind it, and it
>> does not have hundreds of billion-dollar corporations depending on it
>> for critical business operations. Volunteer organizations will be run
>> differently from outfits that have large budgets to pay people to do
>> the ugly work. This is not an excuse, it is simply the current state
>> of affairs.
>
> I'm completely new to the D scene, but I do want to make a comment here.
> One of the reasons why a language like Rust is seeing a surge in
> popularity is because the core team in Mozilla are evangelising it like
> you wouldn't believe it. Rust is a fairly old language, and yet the way
> they present it would fool anybody new to the language. Some things I
> noticed about their approach (having been part of the community for a
> little while) -
>
>   1). Have a nifty, minimalistic website (D has a pretty good website as
> well, but I feel it is a bit overwhelming for newbies).
>
>   2). Present the core strengths of the language on the main page itself
> in a brief sentence (even though they are more half-truths than anything
> else).
>
>   3). They hired someone like Steve Klabnik to give talk after talk, and
> no matter what you may think of him, he is very good at "connecting"
> with the younger folks, and like it or not, the next generation is the
> target audience that will decide if a language is succesful or not.
>     In my opinion (also based on posts that some D users have made on
> the Rust user group), D is actually a much more coherent and powerful
> language than Rust, but most people (including myself) wouldn't have
> known about it on face value.
>
> Self-promotion is something that needs to be done, and the Rust group is
> very good at it. Go, on the other hand, benefits from the Google name,
> of course. I doubt it would have had a quarter of its success just based
> on Rob Pike's status and the merits of the language itself.
>
> Also, community-building is something that absolutely needs to be done
> to convince users to join in with fresh minds, and start building things
> in the language. Only then will a community really flourish, no matter
> how good or bad the language is.
>
>   4). Spam the tech arena - have tons of blogs floating around talking
> about the "cool" features of the language while downplaying the
> complexity hiding around the corner, have a very helpful IRC channel
> where people answer even the silliest questions with a smile, and have
> active forums and users on Reddit, HN, and the like.

We do try on our Freenode channel, but answering with a smile can be 
quite hard. Especially when simple answers are ignored (I am definitely 
guilty of this).

It really doesn't help that we only have one person with OP rights who 
acts upon them. Its annoying since we get spammed every 6-8 months with 
nothing we can do assuming no Freenode admins are on (this is very common!).



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