[OT] Leverage Points

[Dave Jones]

On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 21:59:15 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 19:52:44 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:

> I'm of the complete opposite opinion.
>
> Everyone like to make money, especially more than the industry 
> average; and we should push the narrative that using D lets you 
> print money in unsuspecting markets (and that's really not far 
> from the truth).

That's a hard argument to make. I mean it's a good selling point 
but how do you convince people that D actually does what you say 
it does?


> In Reddit recently there was than comment:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/97q9sq/why_d_is_a_good_choice_for_writing_a_language/e4ce7kx
>
> Who wants to be the competitor getting crushed by the 
> competition because of not using a nimbler, faster language to 
> develop in?*
> Yet that sort of thing happens a hell of a lot in practice.
>
> Constant factors matters a lot when you work on 
> high-performance software, if you can develope 30% faster for 
> the same result then it's a huge competitive advantage.

Yeah of course, but we're talking about blog posts, press 
releases, what will get people to even bother clicking on the 
posts to actually read them. Of course productivity is a big 
sell, but i think it's also important to be seen to be making 
progress on the language and ecosystem. And you're talking about 
getting non D users to click. It's not just about whats important 
it's about what will make people take notice.


> I think that doesn't really move the needle, every native 
> programmer knows that native languages are approximately as 
> fast and that the fastest program had more engineering hours in 
> it. It is _possible_ to have the faster program in any (native) 
> language, now _how long_ will it take?
>
> However if you can have something more featureful with less 
> effort that doesn't run slower then it's appealing. Benchmarks 
> where development time is missing just tell half the story.

I didn't mean to say that runtime performance is all that's 
important although I completely understand why it looked like 
that. What I'm trying to say is that to generate interest the 
posts or articles have to have a bit of a bang. Either show real 
progress, or real advantage.