D is dead

[Walter Bright]

On 9/3/2018 7:19 PM, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> The way for D to appeal to more people is not to address 
> the complaints of those who spend more time writing on the forum grumbling but 
> don't use it much, because in my experience you do much better appealing to the 
> people who are your best customers than to those who tell you if only you could 
> do X there would be huge demand.  I think that has been Walter's experience too.

I've bin in this business a long time. Fun anecdotes:

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I was out jogging with a colleague in the 1990's one day. He said what the world 
really needs, and what he really needed, was a Java implementation that 
generated native code. It would set the world on fire!

I told him I wrote one, he could get it today from Symantec. He never said 
another word on the subject. It turns out nobody wanted a native Java compiler.

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Back in the old Datalight days in the 1980s, a big customer said they couldn't 
use Datalight C because it didn't have Feature X. If only it had X, they'd place 
a Big Order. So I implemented X, and excitedly showed it to them and asked for 
the Big Order. They hemmed and hawed, then said what they really needed was 
Feature Y!

After that, I was a lot less credulous of dangling promises of a Big Order. I'd 
often say sure, and ask for an advance on the order, which worked well at 
filtering out the chain-jerking.

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Related to me by a friend: X told me that what he really wanted in a C++ 
compiler was compile speed. It was the most important feature. He went on and on 
about it. I laughed and said that compile speed was at the bottom of his list. 
He looked perplexed, and asked how could I say that? I told him that he was 
using Cfront, a translator, with Microsoft C as the backend, a combination that 
compiled 4 times slower than Zortech C++, and didn't have critical (for DOS) 
features like near/far pointers. What he really regarded as the most important 
feature was being a name brand.

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Henry Ford said that his market research suggested that people wanted a faster 
horse.

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Trying to figure out where we should allocate our scarce resources is probably 
the most difficult task I face. I know it looks easy, but it is all too easy to 
wind up with a faster horse when everyone else developed a car.