D beyond the specs

[Thomas Mader]

On Friday, 16 March 2018 at 11:44:59 UTC, Chris wrote:
> Would it be possible to find out at DConf in Munich why exactly 
> D is so popular in Germany (my impression) and in other 
> countries of Europe (and that general post code) like France, 
> Italy, GB, Romania and Russia etc.?

My guess is that it has much to do with simple luck.
It's like getting those Goldilock conditions. What I mean by that 
is described in the first couple minutes of this TED talk: 
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_christian_big_history

In communities those Goldilock conditions are not of physical 
nature but of social nature I guess.
For a movement/idea/programming language/... to grow big, it 
seems to be important to get the right people into it. The people 
who are that passionate about it that they put much afford into 
it to convince other people of the value of this new thing. The 
ones who are best candidates for something like that are the ones 
who are very communicative and have a large social net to 
popularize their things on.

What might have happend in Germany is exactly that. The starters 
of companies like Funkwerk, Sociomantic and the like saw value in 
D and decided to use it heavily. They were able to create a 
Goldilock condition by their use and gathered more people around 
it.
If you have more people it's more likely to get even bigger 
because the possibility of another even bigger Goldilock is 
increased. More people mean more connections to other people and 
the thing goes on and on.
In the US it was just not that lucky yet.

For sure there are technical facts to consider but if you follow 
trends, it doesn't always seem to be the crucial factor to choose 
something over the other in technical things.

So finding and convincing or at least introduce such important 
people to your new thing might always be the key thing to do.