[OT] Leverage Points

[Jonathan Marler]

On Saturday, 18 August 2018 at 22:20:57 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/18/2018 9:59 AM, Jonathan Marler wrote:
>> In your mind, what defines the D language's level of success?
>
> It no longer needs me or Andrei.

Yes, I think this state would be a good indicator of success. 
This requires attracting developers with strong technical ability 
and good leadership to manage it. I think requires cultivating a 
community that rewards good work and encourages contribution. 
When I was heavily contributing, it was because of people like 
Seb and Mike who would review pull requests and tried to keep the 
flow of work moving.  But many time it was quashed by other 
developers and eventually it didn't make sense for me to 
contribute anymore when dozens of hours of good work can't get 
through.  If this doesn't change, D won't be able to keep good 
developers.

I posed this question to Andrei because I really want to know the 
answer.  The success of a language can mean very different things 
to each person. The most important aspect of D for me is its 
continuing progress towards stability/robustness.  Though I would 
say that the language could be considered the best in the world 
with its balance of safety, performance and practicality, it is 
very far from perfect.  In my mind, D becomes more successful as 
the language itself becomes better. And if D doesn't continue to 
improve, it will be supplanted by new languages that continue to 
be created at an astounding rate.

Others may consider D's popularity to be the most important 
indicator of D's success.  I think everyone would agree this is 
important, however, I would much rather use a good language on my 
own then a mediocre language with everyone else.

I will also say that in order to read that article and apply it 
to "D's success", you most certainly need to know exactly what 
that means to identify what D's leverage points are. It was an 
interesting article. Many of the concepts were familiar and it 
was interesting to see them all laid out in a simple model and 
prioritized.  Thanks for the link Andrei.