Indicators and traction…

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 15:09:53 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
wrote:
> On 09/23/2015 08:19 AM, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>
>> The most important can be paraphrased as "I had heard of D but 
>> as it
>> was getting no traction, I never looked at it again."
>>
>
> While I agree this is something we need to address, I gotta 
> say: I *strongly* consider that attitude to be highly 
> indicative of a mediocre-at-best developer.
>
> This is engineering, not fucking fashion. Popularity has no 
> place in decision making here. From everything I've seen, 90% 
> of the problems that exist in computing technology today can be 
> traced back directly to some jackass(es) weighing popularity 
> higher than actual technical merit.

While there is truth to this, it's also true that people's time 
is valuable, and many programmers are not going to want to spend 
time learning a language that they're not going to be able to use 
in the long run. And even if it can be used in the long run, if 
they're not going to be able to use it in a job, then maybe their 
time is better spent learning a language which they _will_ be 
able to use in their job - or even help them get a job if they 
know it. That doesn't necessarily mean that such folks are 
mediocre programmers. They simply have priorities and learning a 
better language for the fun of it or simply for pet projects 
doesn't necessarily fit with those priorities. The more that D 
fits in with those priorities (e.g. the more jobs there are where 
D actually gets used), the more that many programmers will be 
interested in D.

Obviously, there's more to learning a programming language than 
learning a tool that you're going to be using at work, or most of 
us wouldn't be here, but not everyone is able to spend enough 
free time on programming to learn new languages for the fun of 
it, and many of those that could would rather spend their time 
actually programming something than learning a new tool.

I completely agree that programmers should learn multiple 
languages, and I would very much like to see technical merit win 
over simple popularity, but popularity does have a significant 
effect on which languages people use and which survive, and 
there's a definite argument to be made that there's less value in 
learning a language which isn't likely to be used much outside of 
pet projects. The simple fact that language X has more traction 
than language Y will generally help language X gain further 
traction regardless of which is technically better. We certainly 
hope though that the technical advantages of D will help it gain 
further traction so that we don't have quite so much of a chicken 
and egg problem there.

- Jonathan M Davis