[OT] Leverage Points

[Joakim]

On Saturday, 18 August 2018 at 13:33:43 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> A friend recommended this article:
>
> http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
>
> I found it awesome and would recommend to anyone in this 
> community. Worth a close read - no skimming, no tl;rd etc. The 
> question applicable to us - where are the best leverage points 
> in making the D language more successful.

I read the whole thing, pretty much jibes with what I've already 
realized after decades of observation, but good to see it all 
laid out and prioritized, as Jonathan said.

I thought this paragraph was particularly relevant to D:

"So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the 
seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a 
lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the 
anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming 
yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you 
insert people with the new paradigm in places of public 
visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; 
rather you work with active change agents and with the vast 
middle ground of people who are open-minded."

This pretty much reflects what Laeeth always says about finding 
principals who can make their own decisions about using D. 
"Places of public visibility and power" for D are commercial or 
open-source projects that attract attention for being well done 
or at least popular.

I'm not sure we're doing a good job of publicizing those we have 
though, here's a comment from the proggit thread on BBasile's 
recent post about writing a language in D:

"I keep seeing articles telling me why D is so great, but nothing 
of note ever gets written in D."
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/97q9sq/comment/e4b36st

Of course, all he has to do is go to the front page of dlang.org 
and follow those links others gave him, but maybe he means 
something really big like google's search engine.

We could probably stand to publicize D's commercial successes 
more. I've been trying to put together an interview blog post 
with Weka about their use of D, got some answers this summer, but 
no response in months to a follow-up question about how they got 
their team trained up on D. We could stand to talk more about 
Sociomantic, D's biggest corporate success so far, I'll put out 
an email to Don. Maybe Laeeth would be willing to do an interview.

On the OSS front, I've sent several interview questions to Iain 
earlier this year about gdc, after he agreed to an interview, no 
responses yet. Tough to blame others for being ignorant of D's 
successes when we don't do enough to market it.

Finally, regarding leverage, I keep pointing out that mobile has 
seen a resurgence of AoT-compiled native languages, but nobody 
seems to be trying D out in that fertile terrain, other than me.