How programmers transition between languages

Laeeth Isharc Laeeth at kaleidic.io
Tue Jan 30 19:19:39 UTC 2018


On Tuesday, 30 January 2018 at 09:20:37 UTC, aberba wrote:
> On Sunday, 28 January 2018 at 18:54:34 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>> On Sunday, 28 January 2018 at 13:50:03 UTC, Michael wrote:
>>> I do worry that, having been using D for about 3 1/2 years 
>>> now, that the perceptions of D outside of this community 
>>> don't seem to be changing much. It does seem to make a huge 
>>> difference to have a big company behind a language, purely 
>>> for the "free advertisement". Most people at my university, 
>>> outside of the computer science department, that are using 
>>> languages like Python and R and MATLAB the most, are very 
>>> aware of Rust and Go, but not D. I wonder if we do need to 
>>> pay more attention to attracting new users just to get people 
>>> talking about it.
>>
>> That's what you would expect, because D is a very ambitious 
>> language, which means its natural user base is much more 
>> spread out and less highly concentrated.  And beyond that, 
>> most code is enterprise code that's closed source, and whilst 
>> the web guys talk a lot and influence the culture, enterprise 
>> guys talk much less and just do their thing quietly.  Even in 
>> our world, how often do you see the people using D get 
>> involved in forum discussions?  Sociomantic, Weka, Ebay, and 
>> so on.  (Or Microsoft - did you know that D was used in their 
>> COM team?  They didn't exactly send out a press release...)  A 
>> little bit, but only a little in relation to their use of the 
>> language.  If you're trying to accomplish something in a 
>> representative enterprise context with lean resources, you 
>> don't have much time to talk about what you are doing.
> That's one big potential mistake. Enterprises care about making 
> money with whatever will help them do that (impress investors). 
> Its developers who care about languages that help them write 
> code that suites their requirements. The focus should be on 
> developers not companies. People using D cannot be represented 
> by Microsoft,
>  Sociomantic,  Weka,  etc. employees. Its of no use chasing 
> after companies... make it useful and everyone else will come.

Who said anything about chasing after companies? There's not much 
chasing after anyone, companies or developers.  One reason the 
quality of people here is so high.  We have a filter that 
fortuitously selects for people with good taste and who don't 
care about superficial things as much.  Learning costs and 
discomfort are amortised, and from an expected value perspective 
are trivial from a long run perspective.  And I suggest it's 
almost a negative cost because one is forced to learn things that 
are good to learn.  I speak very personally when I say this, 
because the value to me of what I have learnt is beyond 
calculation, and let's say that it is a very big number by the 
standards of the industry.

And I don't accept the distinction between developers and 
companies particularly for small and medium sized companies.  
Liran at Weka, I'd call him a pretty serious developer, no? But 
he is also a co-founder and leader of his company.  The 
Sociomantic guys - that goes without saying.  Bastiaan same 
story.  I don't know what role the technical leadership of 
Funkwerk play in running the company, but that was I think a 
decision adopted at a senior level - they have been using D for a 
decade and their product is everywhere.  The train you took 
doesn't say timetable powered by D, but maybe in some years it 
will, haha.  An interesting looking stock chart by the way.  EMSI 
- founder developers adopted D.  Personally I'm in charge of tech 
for a 95 person company and involved in other areas of management 
beyond tech and I'm also a developer.

Every language is based on different principles.  The way D will 
be adopted is via people who are principals giving it a try 
because it solves their problems.  There is no point trying to 
spend much time appealing to those in management who can't make 
decisions themselves and need to consider social factors because 
we have a much better product than we do marketing.  That's okay, 
the social appeal will come later and in truth when it does it 
will be a mixed blessing because the quality of the community 
will change.

>> If you want to draw people to the language (and, honestly, I 
>> wonder why it matters so much to many here
> Its a simple math well understood since long ago.  The larger 
> the army/workforce the better. Things get done. Walter always 
> say here "Its left with someone to do the work". There other 
> stuff he doesn't address including those outside language 
> internals.

Sure, but you are I think mistaking ends for means.  Things 
develop at their own pace and I don't think can be forced.  I've 
noticed that changes tend to happen when they are good and ready 
and not when we wish they would.  So in that context it makes 
sense to focus on what you can control and influence and not on 
what one wishes might be the case.  If wishes were horses beggars 
would ride.  But they don't...

So that doesn't mean that one shouldn't work on guerilla 
marketing if that's what one wishes to do.  But expecting Walter 
or Andrei to come up with a grand plan when there isn't the basis 
for it yet doesn't advance things much.

What one can do is take action, and the smallest actions can have 
very powerful effects because they inspire others.

Seb Wilzbach has been a master of this.  Taking just one small 
example : nobody told him to do anything.  But he thought D 
should have runnable examples.  He wrote code to transform unit 
tests into examples and made them runnable.  (Maybe others were 
involved, I didn't follow).  And I think that small action has 
had more impact on the prospects for D than all the talk without 
action that others have spent time on since he became involved in 
the community.
>
>>- it's clearly
>> taking hold, has momentum and will continue to grow for 
>> decades; an acorn will become an oak tree, and fretting about 
>> how much it's grown in the past year might be missing the 
>> point, so long as it's healthy enough), why not just focus on 
>> both improving the language itself (pull requests, 
>> documentation)
> Someone needs to do that and we're short of people willing,  
> have the time and able to do that.

Human creativity is unlimited.  We will always be short of 
resources. However scarcity is also the mother of invention.  The 
time spent wishing for improvements could also be spent reviewing 
or writing pull requests blog posts, documentation improvements 
etc.  (I know you have written some blog posts).

> Either someone is paid to care enough to do that (Like Google 
> do with Go, Oracle with Java,  Jetbrains with Kotlin,  etc.) OR 
> grow a community/workforce to collectively make that happen.

Compare the documentation today with early 2014.  And the books 
available.  It's massively improved and in outright terms not bad.

What I'm suggesting is that things will continue to get better 
with the passage of time.  Also because external conditions keep 
moving in directions favourable to D.  The calculus of the pace 
of data set sizes to cpu and especially RAM performance is 
inexorable.  And BTW Spectre and Meltdown, they aren't at the 
margin going to get CPU manufacturers to say you know we really 
need to accelerate performance from here - on the contrary, there 
might need to be a change in focus, and everything is a tradeoff.

When conditions shift the people that adopt strategies adapted to 
new conditions mysteriously seem to start doing well.  And people 
copy what's working.  So another factor is that people who start 
using D, it often seems to be quite good for their careers.  From 
the people I have known anyway over the course of a few years.

>> and on accomplishing something useful and worth doing with it?
> There's also a possibility the acorn will loose interest and 
> momentum and... die. Your opinion on what is worth doing is 
> based on your domain or interest.

Life is risk, and anything is possible.  Maybe we shall be 
obliterated by a stray asteroid.  Both scenarios are possible, 
but I don't think so.  Things are growing, and external 
conditions are favourable. What I do involves recognising 
patterns in social things (like language communities), and I've 
seen this before.  D is going to keep growing, and to my eyes is 
already flourishing. Expect plenty of setbacks along the way, for 
that is life, but it's the setbacks that build strength.


>> Of course there are the usual trolls who don't seem to write 
>> much D, but seem to be drawn like vampires to the energy of 
>> those who do.  Sad.
>
> Someone who doesn't write D or have no stake in it's well-being 
> will not waste a second in this forum.

People are strange creatures,some more than others.
>
>> don't seem
> You don't know for sure. Remember we don't all use D the same 
> way.
>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sunday, 28 January 2018 at 17:23:12 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>>> This has been mentioned multiple times, D really needs some 
>>> kind of killer application.
>>
>> Why?
>>
>> It's a generalist language for getting stuff done in an age 
>> where people have succumbed so much to Stockholm Syndrome that 
>> they think it's a positive thing in a language that you can 
>> only use it to do something special.  Yet trends in 
>> performance and performance demands point to the rising 
>> importance of efficiency (and I suspect there will be a return 
>> to the recognition of the importance of being a generalist - 
>> in programming, as in other fields).  There was a tweet by the 
>> author of Musl libc observing that software today runs slower 
>> than software twenty years ago, and linking the bloat to the 
>> insane pressure to maximise CPU performance over all else.  
>> The era of that kind of ruthless optimization is over because 
>> it's not the only thing that matters, and we start to see the 
>> price of it.  And generalism - in a dynamic business 
>> environment, there's considerable value to have capabilities 
>> that aren't adapted to particular narrow skills when what you 
>> need is always changing and may be unknown even to you.
>>
>> My generation was privileged because very quickly if you 
>> wanted to get anything interesting done you had to learn 
>> assembly language (maybe write your own assembler or 
>> disassembler), had to learn a bit about hardware, and could 
>> never pretend the CPU was this perfect platonic abstraction.  
>> And for a while that changed, but I think the past is 
>> returning again, as it often does.
>>
>> So I see a value in hiring hacker / generalist types who can 
>> figure things out.  For example:
>>
>> https://hackaday.com/2017/01/26/a-personal-fight-against-the-modern-laptop/
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzmm87oVQ6c
>>
>> Back in 2007, most finance types would have said how 
>> completely impracticable and unreasonable.  But I say, with GK 
>> Chesterton, that "all progress depends on the unreasonable 
>> man".  And someone like that doesn't succumb to helplessness 
>> once they are outside of their shiny IDE, knows that in the 
>> end everything is just code, and you can change it if you want 
>> to, and there is strategic value from building organisational 
>> capabilities from hiring such people.  Usually I'm a couple of 
>> years ahead, and I think others will follow.  If you hold a 
>> contrarian point of view, you know you're right when surprises 
>> start coming in your direction, and people still can't see it.
>>  And I think that's been the case since 2014.
>>
>> Anyway - so D is a general purpose language, and I think we 
>> are likely seeing a nascent return in recognizing the value of 
>> generalist tools and people.
>>
>>> On my line of work having Go on the skills list is slowly 
>>> becoming a requirement, due to Docker and Kubernetes adoption 
>>> on cloud infrastructures.
>>
>> That's great.  Walter says that good code should look good on 
>> the page, and Go code looks nice enough.  It's got nice 
>> network and infra libraries, as you say.  But why would the 
>> adoption of Go be bad for D?  I think it's great for D because 
>> after a period of stagnation it gets people open to newer 
>> languages, and on the other hand the gap between the spirit of 
>> Go and D isn't that far (GC, clean code, native target) even 
>> if they don't have generics.
>>  It's a big world - both D and Go can succeed, and the success 
>> of one isn't bought at the cost of the other.
>>
>>> Just wondering if mir or easier GPGPU programming could be 
>>> that killer application.
>>
>> We sponsor mir algorithm (some of the routines within were 
>> developed for us, and we were happy to open source them), and 
>> we are rewriting our core analytics - used across the firm in 
>> a $4.1bn hedge fund in D from C++ before that.  What 
>> alternative really exists for what we are doing there?  And 
>> C++ vs D, it's not even a fair fight if you care about 
>> productivity, plasticity of the code, and generating wrappers 
>> for other languages that you can still understand whilst 
>> maintaining decent performance.  At the same time, we're not a 
>> D shop - a diversity of languages is not a bad thing, provided 
>> you have some way for them to work together.  Code reuse is 
>> very difficult, but the UNIX way does work.  On the other 
>> hand, if you want to connect components, how are you to do 
>> that?  Well, D is pretty nice for writing DSLs that can 
>> connect to code written in other languages, and where 
>> expressions can be evaluated from other languages.
>>
>> A specialist language adapted to a particular domain or set of 
>> domains - yes, that benefits from a killer app.  But for a 
>> generalist language that's useful for getting stuff done - why 
>> would there be a single killer app?  That doesn't make sense 
>> to me.  There should be multiple successes across different 
>> domains, and that's what we are beginning to see.  Just bear 
>> in mind that the web and tech guys talk a lot, but most 
>> programmers don't work in those industries.  It would be a 
>> mistake to conflate salience with economic importance, I think.
>>
>>
>> Laeeth.




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