We are forking D

[Dukc]

On Sunday, 7 January 2024 at 21:16:46 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> As somebody has said, it depends on your definition of 
> "success".  If your definition of success is popularity, then 
> sure, you need a big community, lots of existing code, hype, 
> etc..  By that measure C++ is more successful than D and I 
> should be using C++ instead.  But I came to D not because of 
> popularity, but because of technical merit.  I would rather 
> stay with a small, relatively unknown community where technical 
> excellence plays a deciding role, than in a large community of 
> mediocrity where popularity is the deciding factor.  So my 
> definition of success is rather different from what some have 
> been using when bemoaning the current state of D.

I think a good definition of success is `popularity * 
(yourLanguage.technicalMerit - replacedLanguage.technicalMerit)`. 
No matter how popular a language is, if it isn't better than what 
it replaces it can't be considered a success. If it is outright 
worse than the old ones, it's actually a bad thing for it to gain 
popularity.

Of course, there are many definitions for techical merit. Maybe 
your language serves it's task in itself only as well as that it 
replaces, but if it is better in teaching good mental skills than 
it's replacement it still can be considered a success in another 
sense.

Also, great technical merit is always positive as long as you 
have at least some users but the success tends tends to be 
minimal compared to a langauge which is only slightly better than 
older ones but massively more popular.

Another caveat - popularity also has many forms. Even if you have 
little or no direct users, if your work serves to improve other 
languages that take their ideas from you IMO you have part of the 
credit if those languages become popular.