Found on proggit: Nim receives funding from a company (D should be doing something like this)

Laeeth Isharc Laeeth at laeeth.com
Fri Aug 17 00:06:27 UTC 2018


On Tuesday, 14 August 2018 at 07:05:12 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Tuesday, 14 August 2018 at 02:49:58 UTC, Mike Franklin wrote:
>> On Monday, 13 August 2018 at 09:50:29 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>> Announced last week, the Nim team will be adding two 
>>> full-time paid devs and setting up grants for needed projects 
>>> with this new funding:
>>
>> :jealous:
>>
>>> However, there are other ways to raise funds. Companies using 
>>> D could use the existing bountysource page to put up bounties 
>>> for features/fixes or projects they need, to which community 
>>> members who need some particular feature/fix could also 
>>> donate:
>>>
>>> https://www.bountysource.com/teams/d
>>
>> I think bountysource would work if the bounties were 
>> significantly higher, but there are also the funding options 
>> at https://opencollective.com/dlang
>
> Yes, some of those bounties are too low for the amount of work, 
> but nothing stops others who find them important to increase 
> the bounty incrementally.
>
>> Looking on the right column of the page there are several D 
>> enthusiasts contributing their hard-earned money to D.  Maybe 
>> there's a better option for the masses, besides a T-shirt and 
>> a DConf discount, that might encourage more donors.  For 
>> example, I might contribute somewhere between $100 or more if 
>> I could get some attention on some bugs/features that I care 
>> about (assuming I couldn't implement them myself).  Maybe I'll 
>> post a bounty in the near future and see how it goes.
>
> A variation on that appears to be in the cards, as they've said 
> there will be more funding targets:
>
> https://forum.dlang.org/post/orvcznlvraunkksjdgez@forum.dlang.org
>
> I don't really care which website is used, bountysource or 
> opencollective or whatever, but the community is unlikely to 
> contribute unless they have a clear idea of where the money is 
> going, which bountysource does a better job of showing right 
> now.
>
>> Right now, I'm the only one I know of working on the #dbugfix 
>> stuff, but I'm finding the bugs submitted this round 
>> exceptionally difficult.  I don't know if I'll succeed with a 
>> fix this round (Sorry!), but contact me directly, or post an 
>> announcement on the forum, if you have a bug that you're 
>> willing to motivate with a financial contribution to the D 
>> Foundation, and I'll personally take a look at it.  I'm 
>> generally only capable of fixing some of the more simple bugs, 
>> as my skills and understanding of DMD are quite limited, but I 
>> promise I'll try.
>
> This is not about me: I personally don't have any blocker bugs 
> that I'm worried about. I'm concerned about the general pace of 
> D development: I don't think we're as focused or organized on 
> gathering resources as we should be. My preferred model is to 
> turn D into a partially proprietary product, but I guess the 
> core team doesn't like that approach:
>
> https://forum.dlang.org/thread/okuzksqzczprvuklpzaw@forum.dlang.org
>
> Back when I was a little kid decades ago, I had a neighbor who 
> used to build model trains in his garage, what he did in his 
> spare time. I remember seeing it then and being thrilled that 
> it snaked all over his work area. 99% of open source projects 
> are the "model trains" of software devs, something they work on 
> for fun in their spare time, and never get used widely.
>
> To get into the 1% of OSS projects that are actually widely 
> used, you need some way to gather resources to grow the 
> project. There's the linux model where you get a bunch of 
> consulting and support companies to use you. There's the 
> llvm/clang model where you become a product in a large company, 
> part of their portfolio alongside proprietary products or 
> modules that pay the bills. There's the Firefox model where you 
> sell ads alongside the OSS product. There's new models where 
> you use crowdfunding sites like kickstarter or opencollective.
>
> D has so far used very little of any of these models. This 
> project can give off the impression that it is simply a big 
> model train for Walter and Andrei, a hobby that they've retired 
> to work on. Instead, I'd like to see D much more widely used, 
> which means work needs to be done on gathering resources beyond 
> what the project has now.

Have you read Peter Thiel's Zero to One and seen his YouTube 
talks on secrets etc?

He says what I have always believed.  I think market share is a 
legitimate approach if that's your cup of tea, but dominating a 
niche is a much better one if it fits you.  I personally just by 
virtue of who I am as a person found that as a life strategy 
having a very high appeal to a tiny minority of people suits me 
by far better (I like to think they are the best people but who 
is really to say as it depends on your point of view).

I truly don't think it's relevant what most people think of D at 
this point.  The world is a very big place and there's room for 
many languages and I don't think there will be another C - that 
was a creature of its time, and time and conditions have changed 
since then.

Most code is enterprise code that nobody much hears about and I 
guess most programmers are paid to work on enterprise code.  The 
tech guys get an inordinate share of attention because of social 
reasons and because the nature of their business fits with 
talking much more about what they are doing.  But I don't think 
they represent a majority of the code that's written.

D is a very practical language and that means it's quite a good 
tool for enterprise users if such users are at this point rather 
unusual sorts of people able to make up their own minds in the 
absence of marketing and advice from consultants - they also need 
to be people that have the authority to decide to do what's best 
without persuading a committee.

We are in an age that doesn't tend to be very patient about 
enduring temporary discomfort - with D the discomfort is all 
upfront.  So you need to be both imaginative to see the longer 
term benefits and an unusual sort of person to press through the 
early discomfort.  This makes D a great hiring filter if you are 
at the stage of business development where we are today, but it's 
not going to convince many pointy-headed bosses.  So much the 
worse for the pointy-headed bosses.

People are using D to do real work.  As people do that they 
naturally need to make improvements, and why wouldn't you open 
source those ?

The way a broader audience comes to D will be as a result of 
early successes and because of the calibre of the people that are 
earlier adopters of D.  And more importantly because of the 
calibre of people in the D community.  Throw a stone at dconf - 
if you hit a bad programmer you probably missed and hit someone 
from a different conference in the adjacent ballroom.  In the 
outside world things are not always like that.

If you want D to be more widely used then focus on what can be 
done to help the people who are already using it in a small way 
to succeed and use it further, and help people who want to use it 
and almost can but face impediments that might not be difficult 
to overcome but are from where they are sitting.

It's much better to focus on what's to hand and growing steadily 
than to worry about trying to get D to a certain stage of 
popularity.  These things aren't under human control.  The setup 
must be there but then things happen when a bunch of conditions 
inside and out come together all at the same time.

There's a magic when someone solves their own problem that's real 
for them.

Goldman Sachs have their own internal languages for charting and 
analysing data.  Pretty good stuff for the 1990s but they had a 
whole team working on them full-time.

Me, I wanted a DSL too for similar if more nuanced reasons, but 
my resources were considerably less.  Some of my evenings and 
weekends and a couple of very talented part-time developers.  I 
knew of Pegged and had played with it, but it didn't become that 
vivid that it wouldn't be that bad to write the whole thing till 
I had dinner with Bastian at dconf.

Why bother writing a DSL?  Because it's by far easier to register 
types and functions of existing code and not just D code but C# 
and Python.  And one can impose restrictions that don't reduce 
power much but make integration of various codebases and services 
across the firm much easier.

I wrote it for one purpose and turns out it's useful for others I 
never even thought of. Our risk reports across the firm are being 
rewritten in it and now I'm wondering about accounting.  I 
actually wrote it originally to do what Bloomberg custom 
expressions should perform but never will.

Anyway that's the path to it being used more I think.  People you 
have never heard of adopting it in a small way and then in a 
larger way and then sharing their experiences with others.

I don't even want to think about the time I spent manually 
translating headers for C libraries.  Now with DPP that's no 
longer a problem.  In time it will probably work for C++ 
libraries too.

The barrier to introducing D into an existing C codebase just 
keeps coming down.

I use EMSI containers.  They at least downloaded excel-d.  So 
there's a positive spillover dynamic already underway.  Give it 
time and the consequences will become more evident.




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