A strategic vision for D

[Joakim]

On Monday, 7 May 2018 at 15:52:38 UTC, David J Kordsmeier wrote:
> On Monday, 7 May 2018 at 10:27:32 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> [...]
>
> Great marketing beats great tech (sadly), but we are creatures 
> subject to social influence and that which is shiny.
>
> Who actually runs marketing for Dlang?  Is it the foundation, 
> collective cooperation, or ?  Does Dlang have what it needs to 
> be successful in this category in terms of financial resources, 
> expertise, and focus?
>
> As an aside, this was the original marketing for Node.js, in 
> the years before it was acquired by Joyent: 
> http://tinyclouds.org/ .  In a single year, it caught fire 
> (that is, it became wildly successful) because it had a strong 
> BDFL (who was not a dictator, and who stepped down as soon as 
> it made sense to do so, and he took on some messianic stature 
> as a result), strong technical merits, a clear focused message 
> of where it fit in the market, and it met a need.  In fact, it 
> met many more needs than intended, widely used in both cloud 
> and embedded type applications.  8 years on from moving the 
> project into the hands of a corporate sponsor, through much 
> controversy over governance and some community strife, forks, 
> etc., it's doing well in the hands of a foundation: 
> https://foundation.nodejs.org/ .
>
> From a market focused perspective there is the technology 
> itself in one bucket, and then there is the adoption by 
> enterprise.  Certain things have to happen for enterprise 
> adoption to actually take place.  If we follow the pattern of 
> what happened for Go or Node.js, we can boil those down to 
> execution of certain tangibles:
>
> - Project is well documented
> - Project is available under favorable OSS license (I won't get 
> into what favorable means, but for corporations, they have 
> their preferences)
> - Project has a good toolchain and tools support
> - Project has a good IDE integration
> - Project has good sample applications built, lots of good 
> examples
> - Project has a strong and active community of developers with 
> the appropriate mix of core contributors, external 
> contributors, experts, casual users, and people evaluating 
> possible use
> - Project has strong technical merits
> - Project has strong market differentiators (this may require 
> real marketing to get this down on paper and promote this)
> - Project has commercial support available (training, bug 
> fixing, development)
> - Project has an academic community (this often helps seed use 
> in Universities), and students eventually grow up to work for 
> enterprise corporations
> - Project has corporate sponsors (or foundation sponsors ... 
> they are really representing corporations)
> - Project has a sustainable model (legal, financial) to 
> maintain its community, engineering, and marketing.
> - Project has multiple big projects that rely upon it
>
> Grade Go, Rust, and Node.js on this list above.  Where are they 
> at on each item?  Grade Dlang on this.  We still have some work 
> to do.  What companies offer commercial support in D?  Are 
> there any Dlang focused agencies out there?  How many projects 
> are using Dlang commercially?  Who are the corporate sponsors 
> of Dlang?  Again, I think much of this comes back to that 
> marketing message.  What is the unique selling proposition.  
> Define that.  Then conquer the world.

Those are mostly things that have to be done collectively in a 
community project like this. Much has already been done: the 
front page of the website has a slogan, "Fast code, fast," and a 
list of companies using D.

D is never going to have a completely structured process like a 
well-organized company, where it defines those objectives and 
then pays to get them done. As a community project, it's much 
more decentralized, which has its pros and cons, but more 
positives for me than being backed by a single company.

However, what the community leaders can do is put out a strategic 
vision, for the community to gather around if they accept it. The 
vision document is a great example of this, where anyone can pick 
items off that list and go work on them.

However, an overall strategy is broader than that, which someone 
could further by working on something _not on that list_, that 
they think up themselves.