Is it possible to set up DConf Asia?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, June 30, 2018 02:08:08 Joakim via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> Simple, D is a collective effort. If the core team wants to waste
> one of its key funding sources in getting a bunch of hobbyists
> together in a room showing off to each other then going on a
> European vacation, completely ignoring how the world and tech has
> changed from back when that could actually be worthwhile, that
> signals to me and others that D is not a serious effort to build
> a viable programming language. Such an egregious waste of
> resources signals that this is just a bunch of boys having fun
> with their toys, only now out on the town in Europe.
>
> I'm not saying that was the intent all along: I suspect that like
> most people and institutions, DConf simply blindly aped what was
> done in the past, which is why conferences still happen. However,
> I'm now presenting arguments for why that doesn't make sense and
> why that outdated ritual is dying off, as Marco notes, and if the
> response is merely, "That's the way things have been done and
> we'll just keep doing it regardless," well, congrats, you just
> explained the thinking for why C and C++ will never be displaced
> by D.

The response is that those of us who have gone to dconf have found it to be
valuable. It's not just that we're doing what others have done or that we
think that it might be a good idea. It's actually been valuable in practice.

Honestly, this is this first time that I've ever seen anyone try to argue
that conferences like this are a bad idea. My experience has been that it
has been a very good idea, and there are plenty of people out there who
attend conferences regularly and try to get others to go because of how much
value they see in it (and not just for dconf). If anything, the number of
conferences that I've been hearing about has gone up, not down, and plenty
of new conferences have started up in recent years (e.g. BSD Taiwan started
up last year, the OpenZFS guys have started up a at least a couple of
related conferences in the last few years, and RustConf is quite new). If
you think that it's a bad sign that we have dconf, then that's certainly
your choice, but the arguments that you've presented are unlikely to be
persuasive to those of us who have actually attended dconf.

- Jonathan M Davis