[off-topic] Sony releases PS Vita SDK

[SomeDude]

On Friday, 20 April 2012 at 15:38:40 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On 20 April 2012 18:09, SomeDude <lovelydear at mailmetrash.com> 
> wrote:
>
>> On Friday, 20 April 2012 at 13:44:55 UTC, Manu wrote:
>>
>>> It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but I suspect there 
>>> is interest
>>> :)
>>>
>>
>> Maybe if Walter and Andrei were to define some sort of 
>> consortium like
>> there is for Java, companies would be interested in 
>> participating in the
>> development ? I have no idea how it would look like though, as 
>> that would
>> mean a lot more organization and overhead. We clearly don't 
>> work like that
>> right now.
>>
>
> How does that work in Java's case? It doesn't seem to me that 
> there is the
> manpower here to do that.
>

Through the Java Community Process (http://jcp.org). Basically, 
it's where the proposals for APIs are reviewed. It started after 
many people found that the Sun APIs sucked (basically, Sun didn't 
have the manpower to follow all the requests of their users) and 
founded the Apache and Spring projects to compensate for some 
missing parts (the logging API for instance).
Afterwards, key developers of those open source projects became 
active part of the JCP, and companies followed.

There is the list of JSR:
http://jcp.org/en/jsr/all
You can see there is quite a lot of people involved in each 
specification, a leader and then a review group formed of a 
number of experts representing each interested party.

> Okay so you're talking about mega-companies who can afford to 
> invest significant time and money into the language?

Yes.

> I think that's very unlikely to happen these days. But it would 
> still be
> nice to be attractive to mid-large sized businesses to get 
> their hands dirty.

The Oracle-Google trial is interesting, as if Oracle wins, many 
companies would be happy not to have to pay huge money to bastard 
Ellison just to use the Java API.
If there is an alternative, I think they would be interested. 
Right now, the alternative is Microsoft...

> The most significant factor here is to see these entities as 
> customers, and
> not necessarily community participants or contributors. Is the 
> community ready to have those sorts of users?

There is no chance any big company would use D without actively 
contributing to its stabilization beforehand, because they can't 
afford to have their systems broken every other release.

> Their advertising potential may be valuable in bringing other 
> interest and
> contributors into the community, but other than that, what can 
> those
> entities bring to the community that isn't expressed in terms 
> of manpower?

Well, I think manpower is already a very valuable help, don't you 
think ? If some smart people worked all day on the compiler and 
libraries, everything would go much faster.