D on quora ...

[Adam Wilson]

On 10/7/17 14:08, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>>> On 10/6/2017 10:19 PM, Adam Wilson via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>> > What if we stop focusing on the C/C++ people so much? The > like
>>> their tools and have no perceivable interest in moving > away from
>>> them (Stockholm Syndrome much?). The arguments the > use are
>>> primarily meant as defensive ploys, because they > compare everything
>>> to C/C++ and when it doesn't match in > some way or another the other
>>> language must be deficient. > They've already decided that C/C++ is
>>> the meter stick > against which all other languages are to be judged.
>>> > Unsurprisingly, nothing that is NOT C/C++ meets their > exacting
>>> demands.
>
> Yes - as Andrei said in a talk, people are looking for an excuse not to
> have to take the time to learn something new.  There's an inordinate
> strength of feeling in discussions in relation to D.  If it's not your
> cup of tea, why do you care so much?  The raising of spurious objections
> is much better than indifference at this point, and you can see this
> year that there has been a shift.  People got downvoted for repeating
> the same old talking points that are now demonstrably not correct,
> whereas before it was a matter of judgement and people could reasonably
> differ.
>
>
>> On Friday, October 06, 2017 23:19:01 Brad Roberts via
>>> Or recognize that painting huge diverse groups as if there's a single
>>> brush with which to do so is a huge fallacy.  Consider that the two
>>> leaders, as well as a large number of the contributing developers,
>>> come from the c++ community and that's not a bad thing, but rather a
>>> big part of _why_ they came to D.
>>>
>>> As always, focusing on the users of the language tends to pay a lot
>>> more dividends than focusing on nay sayers.  Luckily, that's how
>>> things tend to proceed here, so yay for that.
>
> Long tail.  We really couldn't care less about what most people think.
> In fact it's good that most people won't try D because what they will be
> expecting isn't yet what we offer (glossiness and hand-holding).
>
> At any one time there is a proportion of people who are unhappy with
> their existing choices and looking for something better.  It's easy to
> grow in the early days - you don't need to appeal to most programmers.
> You just need to have a slightly stronger appeal to those who are
> already predisposed to like you (and to those who are already using your
> language and would like to use it for more things).
>
> And people conceive of the market in too small a way.  People talk as if
> languages are in a battle to the death with each other - D can't succeed
> because it's too late, or because Rust has momentum.  But the world is a
> very big place, and the set of people who talk much to a broad audience
> about what they are doing is a small one and thinking it reflects
> reality leads to distorted perceptions.
>
> Who would have thought that probably one of the larger code bases (500k
> SLOC) to be rewritten/converted in D might come from Pascal, with D
> competing with ADA?  I don't know what has been decided there, but
> whatever the outcome, that's highly interesting, because it's probably
> true of others.
>
> Similarly Weka came from nowhere.  A random tweet by Fowler led to them
> building their entire company on a language the founders hadn't used
> before.
>
> Because D is a highly ambitious language that isn't confined to a single
> domain, and that's a potential replacement in some domains for many
> other languages, most people won't know anyone who uses D because use is
> much more spread out.  Enterprise users outside of web + big
> tech/startups don't talk about their choices that much.  Microsoft
> didn't send out a press release when they used D in their COM team, for
> example - someone there just figured it was a good tool for the job and
> got on with it.  Similarly the company that Andy Smith worked for (a
> money management company) didn't say anything, and it only happened that
> he talked about it because I suggested it and he happened to have time.
>
> Inordinately at this point in its development D is going to appeal to
> principals over agents, to people who have at least local authority to
> make decisions and don't have to persuade others, because the dynamics
> of how you persuade a committee are based on quite different things than
> making a decision and living or dying by how it turns out.
>
> That's okay.  If people don't feel they can use D at work, they
> shouldn't.  Some people will be able to, and as they have some success
> with it, others will start to imitate them.  And in the meantime maybe
> it will be an advantage of sorts for the earlier adopters.
>
> It matters who your customers are, because that shapes what you become.
> And it's better early on to have people who make decisions on technical
> merits and who have the authority to do so, then to have a
> representative enterprise buyer!
>
>
> On Saturday, 7 October 2017 at 08:36:01 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> Honestly, I've gotten to the point that I don't care much about trying
>> to appeal to folks who complain about D. If we just make the language
>> the best that we can, that will attract folks - that's largely what's
>> attracted them in the past. Sure, we could and probably should do
>> better with marketing D, and some of the complaints that get leveled
>> at the language are valid and should be addressed, but trying to
>> convince folks who are already convinced that they don't like D just
>> doesn't seem like a good way to spend our time and energy.
>
> I agree with both parts.  It doesn't do any harm to continue to work on
> getting the language's merits across.  There's no point entirely hiding
> our light under a bushel.  But doing good work and making the language
> and ecosystem better is by far more important because that's what
> matters and we're in a time when people will eventually get it even if
> they don't all currently.
>
>> Complaints from folks not using D _can_ help shows us areas in which
>> we're deficient, but they're not necessarily right, and they're not
>> our actual user base.
> Yes.  (I'd put the emphasis on _help_)
>
>
>> And really, what we need is a good language with good tools that
>> supports a vibrant community of those who want to use it. We want that
>> community to grow, because it will help the language and make it
>> easier to get jobs using it, but it's not like we need to convince the
>> whole world to use D - not to mention that there are classes of folks
>> that we don't want; their views and goals just differ too much from ours
>
> People seem to think language decisions are only about technical
> questions.  But they're as much about values, and you're never going to
> get people to agree about values because people are facing different
> problems and are themselves different kinds of people.
>
> https://vimeo.com/230142234  Bryan Cantrill of Joyent nails it
>
>
>>  which is part of why having a diverse set of languages out there can
>> actually be valuable. Different folks prefer different languages, and
>> trying to get everyone to agree is never going to work. As long as D
>> is sucessful enough that those of us who want to use it can use it and
>> do what we need to get done, then that should be plenty. If more folks
>> decide that they like what D's offering, then great. If they prefer
>> C++ or C# or Rust or whatever, then they can have fun doing whatever
>> they need to do with those languages, and we won't have to make
>> changes to D just to make them happy.
>>
>> - Jonathan M Davis
>
>
> In a polyglot environment, D's code generation and introspection
> abilities might be quite valuable if it allows you to write core
> building blocks once and call them from other languages without too much
> boilerplate and bloat.  One could use SWIG, but...

Oh dear, I seem to have accidentally set off a firestorm.

Personally, I think there are better places to focus our energy than 
worrying about what the users of other languages think. We like D, that 
should be enough for us. The last line was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. 
There is no way we're going to convert C#/Java users either, and unlike 
C/C++ we cannot easily inter-operate with them.

I like D because I get a language that feels comfortably similar to 
C#/Java, than adds a bunch of really useful tools on top of it, and is 
natively compiled. Instead of worrying about how to get more people to 
come from a specific language. People will come if they see an advantage 
in D so lets try to provide as many advantages as possible. :)

-- 
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
import quiet.dlang.dev;