Prime time???

[Bill Baxter]

Tiberiu Gal wrote:
> On Fri, 03 Nov 2006 22:31:26 +0200, Walter Bright  
> <newshound at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> 
>> Charlie wrote:
>>
>>> I've been fretting over the same thing, and a 'moving target' 
>>> describes  it well.
>>>  With all the new additions recently I stopped holding my breath, I  
>>> figure at this rate it'll be another 3 years for a 1.0.
>>
>>
>> But isn't every language a moving target? Doesn't it make sense to 
>> just  start using it?
> 
> 
> For most of us D is the spare time language, unfortunately - just 
> because  it's name is 0.x! I'm sure that the same compiler named 1.0 
> would change  this into making D the  first option in many projects.
> 
> For instance, I made a small DWT replica of a SWT application we use at 
> my  company.
> It's stable and faster, but it wasn't accepted in use because D is 0.x!
> ... people are superstitious this days

You may be right, but I have serious doubts that slapping a 1.0 label on 
D is going to make any difference to the superstitious folks in your 
company.  "Not 1.0" is just a convenient excuse for not straying from 
the beaten path.  If D becomes 1.0 they'll probably just change their 
tune to "Sorry, not a good enough tool-chain yet".  Most likely what 
they really mean is "Sorry, it's still not Java."  Managers prefer to 
play it safe when it comes to tool choices.  And can you blame them? Why 
should they go out on a limb and choose D when they can see examples 
every day in the trade rags of companies that have been successful with 
Java or C++?

Success for D has to come from the ground up with people like you using 
for their own little tools here and there, until eventually there's 
enough critical mass taht managers can't ignore it anymore.

I remember a guy that used Python in a company I worked for about 10 
years ago.  I remeber thinking "Python?  whatever dude".   He just used 
it for perlish munging of things in our internal build system.  He used 
it because he liked it, and management didn't care how he did it as long 
as it got the job done.  Anyway ten years later big companies now pay 
attention to Python, but few people cared about it back then.  I don't 
think Python's 1.0 made much difference to anyone.  I didn't start 
really looking at it till 2.something.  But the number didn't have 
anything to do with it.  The reason was I started hearing about it from 
lots of different places.  It was buzz, networking, critical mass, or 
something else, but it was not a version number.

--bb