Build It And They Will Not Come

[Daniel via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Tuesday, 18 August 2015 at 19:35:02 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> I hate the movie "Field of Dreams" where they push the idiotic 
> idea of "Build it and they will come." No, they won't. There's 
> a blizzard of stuff competing for their attention out there, 
> why should they invest the time looking at your stuff? You need 
> to tell them why!
>
> Here's the frustrating typical pattern I've seen here for years:
>
> 1. spend hundreds if not thousands of hours developing 
> something really cool
> 2. spend 2 minutes posting a link to the repository on 
> D.announce
> 3. someone posts it to reddit. Ignore it
> 4. get frustrated that nobody looks at it
> 5. get bitter and quit
>
> Here's the pattern that works a lot better:
>
> 1. spend hundreds if not thousands of hours developing 
> something really cool
> 2. spend 10 minutes writing the announcement to D.announce. Be 
> sure to include:
>    who, what, where, when, why, and how
> 3. someone posts it to reddit
> 4. post the who, what, where, when, why and how on reddit AS 
> SOON AS POSSIBLE after the reddit link appears. Stuff on reddit 
> has a VERY SHORT shelf life. If it doesn't get action within a 
> couple hours, it fades into oblivion. Identify yourself as the 
> author, say AMA. The first one to post a comment tends to spark 
> and set the tone for the discussion.
> 5. check back on reddit once an hour or so for the next day, 
> answer questions
> 6. *****
> 7. profit!

One thing that always comes to mind is that D does not have a 
free, extensive, structured good reference as Go 
(https://www.golang-book.com/books/intro) and Rust 
(https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/index.html) do. I mean, compare 
D's learn section (http://forum.dlang.org/group/learn) to those 
other links. It's kind of frustrating to newcomers. I've read 
Andrei's book and its awesome. Couldn't you guys consider making 
it open and the official book?

For the web guys, you should really consider committing something 
with vibe.d to TechEmpower 
(https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/). A lot of web 
programmers look at that.

Finally, a good comparison between D's GC and the Go's 1.5 GC 
would be great. The latter has been making a lot of impact 
recently.