D future ...

[timmyjose via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 20 December 2016 at 15:42:16 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> On Tuesday, 20 December 2016 at 15:17:56 UTC, Benjiro wrote:
>> I do not recall seeing on the C++ and other forums this 
>> constant attitude from fix it yourselves or put it in the 
>> libraries or ... Its mostly on the smaller languages where 
>> they lack people. And at the same time, that is a very scary 
>> though for companies who want to use a language.
>
> I think it's important to be realistic. One of D's limitations 
> is that it does not have the money of Microsoft or Intel behind 
> it, and it does not have hundreds of billion-dollar 
> corporations depending on it for critical business operations. 
> Volunteer organizations will be run differently from outfits 
> that have large budgets to pay people to do the ugly work. This 
> is not an excuse, it is simply the current state of affairs.

I'm completely new to the D scene, but I do want to make a 
comment here. One of the reasons why a language like Rust is 
seeing a surge in popularity is because the core team in Mozilla 
are evangelising it like you wouldn't believe it. Rust is a 
fairly old language, and yet the way they present it would fool 
anybody new to the language. Some things I noticed about their 
approach (having been part of the community for a little while) -

   1). Have a nifty, minimalistic website (D has a pretty good 
website as well, but I feel it is a bit overwhelming for newbies).

   2). Present the core strengths of the language on the main page 
itself in a brief sentence (even though they are more half-truths 
than anything else).

   3). They hired someone like Steve Klabnik to give talk after 
talk, and no matter what you may think of him, he is very good at 
"connecting" with the younger folks, and like it or not, the next 
generation is the target audience that will decide if a language 
is succesful or not.
     In my opinion (also based on posts that some D users have 
made on the Rust user group), D is actually a much more coherent 
and powerful language than Rust, but most people (including 
myself) wouldn't have known about it on face value.

Self-promotion is something that needs to be done, and the Rust 
group is very good at it. Go, on the other hand, benefits from 
the Google name, of course. I doubt it would have had a quarter 
of its success just based on Rob Pike's status and the merits of 
the language itself.

Also, community-building is something that absolutely needs to be 
done to convince users to join in with fresh minds, and start 
building things in the language. Only then will a community 
really flourish, no matter how good or bad the language is.

   4). Spam the tech arena - have tons of blogs floating around 
talking about the "cool" features of the language while 
downplaying the complexity hiding around the corner, have a very 
helpful IRC channel where people answer even the silliest 
questions with a smile, and have active forums and users on 
Reddit, HN, and the like.

    5). Have regular online meetups and offline and online 
conferences as well.