An inconvenient truth

[Walter Bright]

Walter Bright wrote:
> How do I know this? I see it all the time. I won't use your product 
> because of XYZ. So, I fix XYZ. Still no sale. Obviously, that was not 
> the real reason.

I have an amusing anecdote on this. Many years ago back when DOS was 
king and buffalo roamed the plains, I heard a rant from a C++ developer 
that compile speed was the most important issue. He went on and on about 
it. So what C++ compiler did he use? Glockenspiel's translator and MS's 
C compiler. That combination was 4 times slower than other compilers.

Clearly, compile speed was not at all the issue that made him open his 
checkbook, not even close.

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10 years ago, a colleague made an impassioned pitch to me that what the 
world needed was a native code Java compiler. I listened politely while 
he told me what a killer compiler that would be, and that if I was smart 
I'd listen to him and build it.

I told him I'd already built one a couple years previously (for 
Symantec) and it did poorly. Nobody cared about it.

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Before I started on D, I was convinced by others that the world needed a 
fast Javascript interpreter. I wrote one that was 20 times (yes, twenty 
times) faster than Mozilla's. Nobody cared.

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The products I've done which were successful all, 100%, started out with 
people laughing at me for doing them.