Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives

[bachmeier]

On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 06:26:30 UTC, Joakim wrote:

> "Once the videos are all up, set up weekend meetups in several 
> cities [all over the world], where a few livestreamed talks may 
> talk place if some speakers don't want to spend more time 
> producing a pre-recorded talk, but most time is spent like the 
> hackathon, discussing various existing issues from bugzilla in 
> smaller groups or brainstorming ideas, designs, and libraries 
> for the future."
>
> I can setup an event like this in my city, where AFAIK nobody 
> uses D, so most of it would be geared towards introducing them 
> to the language.
>
> I estimate that you could do ten times better at raising 
> awareness and uptake with this approach than the current DConf 
> format, by casting a much wider net, and it would cost about 
> 10X less, ie you get two orders of magnitude better bang for 
> the buck.

I think this is something that could be done *in addition to* 
DConf. I honestly don't think DConf is very effective at 
promoting D, except perhaps to a small sliver of the overall 
population of programmers, due to the content of most of the 
presentations. {This is not intended to be a criticism or a 
statement that anything about DConf should be changed.}

I believe it would be a mistake to drop DConf. If we did that, 
the story that would be told is "D couldn't even support its own 
conference. Use Rust or Go or Julia instead." Our view would be 
"we're on the cutting edge" but everyone else's view would be 
"the language is dying".