Could D have fit Microsoft's needs?

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Monday, 22 July 2019 at 19:52:33 UTC, XavierAP wrote:
> On Monday, 22 July 2019 at 16:29:16 UTC, Newbie2019 wrote:
>>
>> Lack of user  population is hurting D as vicious circle.  No 
>> people use, resulting in hidden bugs,   and then lead to less 
>> people use.
>
> I too think this is the biggest problem (I am repeating 
> myself). So what can we do to encourage newcomers? Is D 
> welcoming, and appealing? There are some good ideas posted 
> above; are they listened to?
>
> My two cents: these newsgroups/forums could benefit from some 
> reorganization; many people have asked/proposed changes. As for 
> Learn, the last community survey voted in favor of moving that 
> to StackOverflow (where there is already D traffic); this is a 
> more suitable, powerful and searchable platform, and would 
> provide free exposure and immense search engine exposure 
> compared to here.
>
> Does D have or want a plan to promote itself, given that the 
> results so far in this regard have not been good at all? Are we 
> too busy putting out fires, and too stressed because we don't 
> have enough firefighters, that we don't stop to realize that no 
> one besides the firefighters care that fires are burning? Are 
> other people not open to D, or is it that D neglects to promote 
> itself properly at all?

What matters for a tool is are people using it to accomplish 
things.  Not so long ago it seemed like it was mostly Sociomantic 
and now there are quite a few more cases where people are using 
it to accomplish things.

Enterprise users in particular post very little in the forums, 
maybe because they have a lot of work to do. You can even see 
this happen as people move from having primarily a community 
involvement to actually using D at work.  Most obvious to me in 
people that I work with that came from the community.

It's a time of transition.  Most companies don't speak at 
technical conferences and aren't involved at all in open source.  
So for internal innovation it's not going to leave much of a 
footprint in the open source world.

D isn't competing with Rust or Go really,in my opinion.  It's 
definitely competing with Excel, but it might even be competing 
with paper and telephone calls.  In a sense with the introduction 
of search at Google there was a fight to the death between C++ 
and paper, and it really wasn't a fair battle.

It's not very nice of you to say the results so far in language 
outreach have not been good at all without being more specific.  
The Foundation is just getting started and same thing with the D 
blog.  Seems to me the latter has had a pretty strong start.

The world is long people with strong views about what to do,short 
on those willing to contribute something to make their vision a 
reality.

Just imagine if Seb Wilzbach had spent all his time arguing for 
why we should have executable examples on the web docs rather 
than just doing the work needed to make it happen.

I do agree that D can still do better to get across its merits 
but I think the answer to that is contributing educational blog 
posts and success stories.

The values of D are a bit different from those of Rust or Go it 
seems to me.  Bryan Cantrill talk on platform as values is very 
good on this.  It's not that it's a bad idea to do more, but I 
think that accessibility just is one value that's less important 
to the D community than for example to Rust.  Oh well - values 
are about how you choose when you can't have everything and 
accessibility, particularly prematurely, isn't only a benefit.

Quality of adopter dominates quantity I think at this stage.  One 
Manu or Liran or Bastiaan or Dragos or Ali is worth quite a few 
assorted Reddit commentators because there's a much greater 
contagion effect and because adoption within organisations is 
driven by different sorts of people who look at different things 
from what you might expect.

Board level people are quite open minded.  It's the middle 
managers that are most caught up in social proof dynamics.  I had 
the outgoing COO of a large UK investment bank (responsible for 
technology too) stop by to see what we were doing and he was 
quite open and curious.  But I bet the guy five levels down would 
likely have a rather different mindset; on the other hand it 
wouldn't be the junior guy that is deciding.

There's a massive tech spending boom underway in finance and 
maybe other non-tech companies.  Deutsche Bank is spending 13bn 
by 2022 and their market cap is only 16bn.  Generali,the 
insurance company, had a similar sized programme.  Digital 
transformation changes so many things that what seemed impossible 
becomes so.  I'm not saying they are going to use D because I 
don't know.  But the context is the pie is expanding and I don't 
think a zero sum mindset gets you anywhere.

Digital transformation is about adaptiveness and speed.  Moore's 
Law is dead in economic terms and yet useful data sets might grow 
10x in the next dozen years.  I don't think there will be a 
shortage of people in coming years wanting to write fast code 
fast and some of those will use D.  I've been saying this for a 
few years now and since then Mercedes, Audi and Weka are just a 
few of the notable adopters.  I don't think people were expecting 
that to happen five years ago.  These things take a long time.