Could D have fit Microsoft's needs?

[Guillaume Piolat]

On Monday, 22 July 2019 at 01:31:17 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 7/21/2019 11:46 AM, aliak wrote:
>> A bug in Nullable cause of us to swear off working on the D 
>> version - but the same person got defeated by the Rust borrow 
>> checker but that for some reason did not make him swear it off.
>
>
> I'm not surprised. I see this all the time. It's the "social 
> proof" thing at work.

I think we can get some social proof, it requires continuing:
- emphasizing commercial success ($$$$$), big businesses over 
smaller ones.

- replacing (in volume) talk that excuse D for its choices(GC, 
supposedly "wrong" default that are actually the right ones...) 
with a discourse that talks about positives. This is a big one, 
you can see it all the time: if your release notes detail all the 
bug that were fixed, the overall impression is that "wow, there 
are many bugs".

- phasing out "D-man", or invest in making it more like a winning 
mascot

In literatture about "diffusion of innovations", it's pretty 
clear who brings the new technology matters quite a bit more than 
adequacy.

Social proof doesn't _have to_ work against us.

"D is ancient and has 'worked out' " => "D is stable and has a 
growing amount of companies using it for beating the 
expectations" (which is true btw)

In my view, people using unproductive languages (you know what 
they are) are "loosers", it shouldn't be us that pass as loosers.