Marketing D [ was Re: GCC 4.6 ]

[Walter Bright]

retard wrote:
> "Around 2005, interest in the Ruby language surged in tandem with Ruby on 
> Rails, a popular web application framework written in Ruby. Rails is 
> frequently credited with making Ruby "famous" and the association is so 
> strong that the two are sometimes conflated by programmers who are new to 
> Ruby.[9]" [1]

I have the second edition of "Programming Ruby", the definitive book on Ruby. 
Ruby was first released in 1995, and the first edition in 2000, and there never 
would have been a second edition if it wasn't famous.


> "JRuby was originally created by Jan Arne Petersen, in 2001. At that time 
> and for several years following, the code was a direct port of the Ruby 
> 1.6 C code. With the release of Ruby 1.8.6, an effort began to update 
> JRuby to 1.8.6 features and semantics. Since 2001, several contributors 
> have assisted the project, leading to the current (2008) core team of 
> four members." [2]
> 
> "On April 30, 2007, at MIX 2007, Microsoft announced IronRuby, which uses 
> the same name as Wilco Bauwer's IronRuby project with permission.[3] It 
> was planned to be released to the public at OSCON 2007.[4]" [3]
> 
> My interpretation: JRuby existed before Ruby was famous.

As you said, it was the same source code. That doesn't count.


> I don't use Python that much so I have no idea when it really got 
> popular.

Python was started in 1989. I remember a fair amount of buzz about it in 1997. 
My 1999 book on Python claims it is "becoming mainstream".


  The code swarm video [4] gives some impressions. It looks like in
> 2000 it finally took off. Jython started in 1997 and moved to sourceforge 
> in 2000 [5]. IronPython was announced in 2006 [6].

This account http://hugunin.net/story_of_jython.html says that the creator of 
Jython worked with Guido personally. That suggests it, too, at least started as 
a port of Python. "This gave me the wonderful opportunity to work closely with 
many of the key Python developers there, including Guido van Rossum himself."

By the way, Cristi has created a .net implementation of D. Does that count?