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[Dicebot via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 12 July 2014 at 16:38:35 UTC, Russel Winder via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Sat, 2014-07-12 at 15:41 +0000, Dicebot via Digitalmars-d 
> wrote:
> […]
>> Sorry but I am tired of endless appeal to history / usage - by 
>> this logic Java and PHP are very good languages full of 
>> wisdom. And if someone thinks so we will have a hard time 
>> agreeing about anything.
>
> Why are you tired of this? History is extremely useful for 
> learning and
> moving forward.

Because history is never as simple as those referring to it want 
it to be. Connecting some facts and assuming tight relation 
between those is annoyingly common fallacy.

> Maybe PHP is an aberration designed to allow broken
> websites, but many still like it and use it successfully.

This is exactly what I have meant - there is no point to refer to 
historical language success when discussing technological issues. 
Saying that some feature is fine simply because language that has 
it is widely used is an approach that does not cope well with the 
existence of PHP.

Everyone will be happy with this decision until it becomes a real 
pain but it doesn't make it any better. Don't mix marketing and 
language design.

> So what is the inertia breaker to get Fortran, C and C++ folk 
> to use D?
> I have no idea, but unless there are active user local groups
> evangelizing D nothing will change. This email list is 
> important as a
> central exchange mechanism, but it is useless for marketing and
> evangelizing.

Evangelizing is a playing an alien game with starting 
disadvantage. No way you can over-hype Google. I believe D should 
stick to its strengths - being versatile, pragmatical and not 
opinionated. Targeting not "folks" but senior developers who 
chose languages for next big application and have already learned 
their hard lessons of trusting the hype.

Whatever marketing strategy is considered, though, does not 
really matter here. What I am asking here is to stop attacking 
technological decisions from marketing standpoint. I hate it.