Marketing of D - article topic ideas?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Eric Poggel" <dnewsgroup at yage3d.net> wrote in message 
news:huck02$1rel$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 6/4/2010 11:13 AM, Adam Ruppe wrote:
>> On 6/4/10, Eric Poggel<dnewsgroup at yage3d.net>  wrote:
>>> I prefer D to PHP, but writing a web app in D would take me much longer
>>> due to the lack of web-oriented libraries.
>>
>> What kind of stuff would you need? I admit I did spend several
>> weekends doing prep work on libraries before proposing it to the
>> client - had to write mysql, cgi, http get and post, my xml code, and
>> some helper functions to extend std.json before I was confident enough
>> in having the libraries to propose it, but now I have that, and can
>> share if it sounds useful.
>>
>> The only place where library lacking has hit me so far is interfacing
>> with Facebook. For that part of the app, I still use PHP. I'd like to
>> port it eventually, implementing oauth and such in a nice, generic
>> way, but I haven't gotten around to it yet... still, the vast majority
>> of what I need I can do now in plain D.
>
> It would be nice to have a web library for D, but my web development has 
> been almost exclusively for shared hosting environments.  Also, most web 
> developers know PHP while zero know D.  Clients would see that as lock-in.

A lot of clients I know wouldn't know the difference anyway, and thus 
wouldn't misinterpret it as lock-in. (Guess I've been lucky in that regard 
:) ) Although, if a client is really savvy (not that that's common), they'd 
know that 1. While PHP developers are abundant, *good* PHP developers are 
about as rare as any non-mainstream language and 2. When you know how to 
code in a language, transferring those skills to a similar language (for 
example, imperative-to-imperative) is fairly easy (That's a fact that, 
unfortunately, seems to be completely unknown by non-programmers, especially 
HR people...which is one of the reasons I consider HR people to be nothing 
but worthless morons that collect a paycheck without contributing anything 
worthwhile to society, and in fact, only serve to drag society down. It 
*should* be their job to know such things, but they don't, and those 
societal leeches get paid anyway...I even talked to one headhunter (they're 
like HR people but even worse) who was actually stupid enough to blurt out 
"I don't know anything about programming, but I can identify people who are 
good at it"...riiiight, like that's even conceivably possible outside her 
hometown of looneyville...but I'm veering waaay offtopic...).

Regarding support for custom cgi on shared hosts: I looked into that 
recently on the shared hosts I typically deal with, and it turned out to be 
more widely supported than I thought. Maybe I've just been lucky on that 
too, but it could be you're underestimating the support for it like I was.

Also, even if support for a language among shared hosts is small, the only 
way that's ever going to change is if a lot of developers want it. And the 
only way that's ever going to happen (these days) is if there's a good web 
library for the language. (Not that that'll guarantee success, but it would 
be a necessary step.)