[OT] Leverage Points

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 11:55:33 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>> "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."

(Quoting from the article I think).

Kuhn and Lakatos.  Paradigm shifts don't take place when the 
dominant paradigm is defeated by logical or empirical means.  
Paradigm shifts take place when for some reason people say "how 
about we stop talking about that, and start talking about this 
instead".

I think he described certain political changes in the Western 
World beginning in the mid to late 60s rather well.  I don't 
think it describes how changes in the sphere of voluntary 
(non-political ie market and genuine civil society) activity 
unfold.  Supposing it were a good idea (which it isn't), how 
would one be able to to insert people in places of public 
visibility and power who put forward a point of view that is very 
different from the prevailing one?  Only via a program of 
entryism, and I don't think that in the end much good will come 
of that.

So I think the original author has cause and effect the wrong way 
around (not too surprisingly because he is talking about things 
that relate to politics and activism).  [NB one shouldn't mention 
the Club of Rome without mentioning what a failure their work 
was, and it was predictably and indeed predicted to be a failure 
for the exact same reasons it failed].

It isn't that you insert people representing the new paradigm in 
positions of influence and power.

It is that people from the emerging new paradigm - which is 
nothing, a bunch of no-hopers, misfits and losers viewed from a 
conventional perspective - by virtue of the fact that it has 
something useful to say and has drawn highly talented people who 
recognise that start ever so slowly to begin things and 
eventually to accomplish things - still on the fringes - and over 
time this snowballs.  After a while turns out that they are no 
longer on the fringes but right at the centre of things, in part 
because the centre has moved.

The best illustration of this phenomenon was I think in a work of 
fiction - Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.  I never expected 
someone to write a novel based on a mailing list - the 
cypherpunks.  It was about as surprising to me then as it would 
be to see Dlang - the movie - today.  And of course that itself 
was an early indication that the ideas and ways of thinking 
represented by what was originally quite a small community were 
on the ascent.

>>> 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.

Well - I understand what you mean, but I don't recognise this as 
being my point.  Principals who can make their own decisions 
probably aren't today highly visible and visibly powerful.  The 
latter comes much later on in the development of a project, 
movement or scene and if you're visible it's a tax that takes 
time away from doing real work.  By the time you're on the front 
cover of Time or The Economist, it's as often as not the 
beginning of the end - at least for anything vital.


> 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.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing to go for big stories.  But it's 
a mistake to place the attention people today naturally tend to.  
It doesn't matter what influences most people - it matters what 
influences the person who is poised on the edge of adopting D 
more widely, adopting D as a beginning, or would be if they knew 
of the language.  The latter is quite a different sort, I think.

Liran at Weka picked up D because he saw Kent Beck post on 
Twitter about Facebook's Warp written in D (or maybe it was a 
linter) and it seemed like an answer to a particular problem he 
had (if I am remembering correctly).  It wasn't because of a 
grand thing - it was because of a little thing that seemed like 
it might be a creative solution to a real problem.

Signal:noise is much higher away from the limelight too.  By far 
better to have a high share of attention in some specific domains 
or interest groups than to have a low share of attention of some 
enormous market.

> 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.

Well, someone could just take the key insights and experiences 
from their talks, write them up, check with them and post.  The 
latter are a considerable commitment already for a startup that's 
hitting a revenue growth phase.  There are lots of things for 
them to be busy with beyond just the technology.

>
>>> 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.

If we had autowrap for JNI and could dump the types and method 
prototypes as part of the pre-build process, what would the next 
stage be to be able to just call Android APIs from D and have 
them work?  JNI isn't that bad (I know it's deprecated) and I 
used it already from D in a semi-wrapped way.  So I wonder how 
much more work it would be to have autowrap for JNI.  I didn't 
use reflection on the Java side because I wasn't wrapping that 
much code.  Are there XML descriptions of Android APIs you could 
use to generate wrappers?