[OT] Leverage Points

[Joakim]

On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 04:46:35 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 18:49:53 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Read Vilfredo Pareto on the circulation of the elites, Toynbee 
> on the role of creative minorities, and Ibn Khaldun on 
> civilisational cycles.
>
> There's not much point focusing on the influential and powerful 
> people and projects of today - they have too much else going 
> on; powerful people tend to become a bit disconnected from 
> reality, complacent and they and hangers-on have too much 
> vested in the status quo to change.  When you have nothing, you 
> have not much to lose, but after considerable success most 
> people start to move to wanting to keep what they have.  This 
> doesn't bring open-mindedness to new ideas or approaches.

Sure, and though I've not read any of those books, where did I 
suggest going after the "influential and powerful?" I simply 
echoed your statement about going after principals who are free 
to make their own path, who as you've stated before are usually 
at startups or small projects where everything doesn't have to 
get past a committee.

> But we live in a dynamic economy and time and the winners of 
> tomorrow might look unremarkable today.  Linus said it was just 
> a hobby project, nothing big like Minix.  Would you have 
> thought a few German PhDs had a chance with no capital, 
> starting amidst a bad financial crisis and using a language 
> that was then of questionable stability and commercial 
> viability?

Yes, the next great kernel developer or Sociomantic is looking 
for the language to write their project with now. Hopefully, D 
will be the right choice for them.

>> 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
>
>
> I don't think it matters a lot what people like that think.  In 
> aggregate yes, but as Andrei says people are looking for an 
> excuse not to learn a new language.  Somebody actually ready to 
> try D will sooner or later come across the organisations using 
> D page and see that the situation is a bit different.

Looking at his proggit comment history now, he seems exactly like 
the kind of intelligent, opinionated sort D should be attracting: 
I don't think he was looking to dismiss D. He could have looked 
harder, we could have marketed harder: there's blame to go around.

>> I'll put out an email to Don. Maybe Laeeth would be willing to 
>> do an interview.
>
> Sounds a good idea.

Alright, I'll email you soon.

>> 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.
>
> I think we are still in very early stages.  Lots of companies 
> in orgs using D I don't know much about.  The Arabia weather 
> channel have a YouTube on their use of D, but I don't speak 
> Arabic.  Hunt the Chinese toy company is interesting.  Chinese 
> tech scene is huge and very creative, possibly more so than the 
> US in some ways.
>
> You might ask EMSI and also AdRoll.
>
> By early days I mean it's better to look for interesting 
> stories where people are doing real work on a small scale with 
> D than trying to find super impressive success stories only.

We're doing both: most of the material on the D blog and my own D 
interviews are not with corporate representatives. We could stand 
for more of the latter though, especially the big successes, 
because people are more influenced by them.

Many devs use large corporate deployments as a litmus test of 
whether they should explore a new tech. To the extent that we've 
never published a blog post about Weka, only offhand mentions 
like when Andrei visited Israel, that is a big marketing failure 
for D.

I know the Weka guys are very busy, but the further success of D 
will only help them too, so they're undercutting themselves by 
not making sure that blog post gets done.

>> 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.
>
> I did try, but it's not exactly easy to make a complete app in 
> D, even on Android.  It would be great if there were some way 
> to automatically wrap the APIs.

Right now, the Android port is more suited for writing some 
performant libraries that run as part of an existing Android app. 
The kind of polish you're looking for will only come with early 
adopters pitching in to smooth out those rough edges.

On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 08:31:15 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
> But the extension of that is that you need to have something 
> enticing to write about and there seems to be very little 
> happening at the moment. DPP is probably the most interesting 
> thing happening atm.

How about this? The latest release of ldc, 1.11, is the first one 
to ship with a mostly working AArch64 port, which is the most 
widely used CPU architecture for personal computing these days as 
it powers billions of mobile devices (most iOS devices and about 
half of Android devices). This is the culmination of years of 
patches worked on by core devs on the ldc and gdc teams- David, 
Ian, Kai, Johannes, and so on- to which I recently added the 
Android portions.

I'm now able to write and compile D executables _on_ my 5.5" 
Android/AArch64 smartphone using ldc 1.11, the same device on 
which I'm writing this long forum post, using a bluetooth 
keyboard. I've kicked off a build using the Termux build scripts 
and will soon be submitting a pull so you can do the same on your 
Android phone or tablet, after running this simple command in the 
Termux app for Android, `apt install ldc`:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.termux&hl=en

I'll start writing up a post for the D blog about the Android 
port, after I edit the wiki page to show how to build for 
Android/AArch64 too:

https://wiki.dlang.org/Build_D_for_Android