D easily overlooked?

[Andrew Chapman via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 14 July 2017 at 08:57:17 UTC, Wulfklaue wrote:
> https://blog.sourced.tech/post/language_migrations/
>
> A recent article where github programming languages popularity 
> and migration got analysed was very interesting but it showed 
> one noticeable thing:
>
> A total lack of D even mentioned!!!
>
> When looking at other language ranking sites, D always scores 
> better then Rust. Yet, Rust gets included in the ranking but D 
> is ... nowhere to be seen. It gets even a bit annoying when its 
> always Rust, Rust, Rust ... that keeps popping up. Seen it more 
> and more how Rust is simply trampling over any D messaging.
>
> D... It really has no very unique feature that makes it 
> noticeable.
>
> * No Galactic overlord ( C#, Go, ... )
> * no GC language that people can push until people there ears 
> bleed ( Rust)
> * no really unique features that people care about to set it 
> aside from C/C++, ...
> * It has the kitchen and sink but nobody talk about the kitchen 
> and sink.
>
> I know people will jump onboard and start yelling how D has 
> very unique features but from the "outside world" its always 
> the same response. While more people are downloading D and 
> trying it out, i barely see any independent D language blogs.
>
> Not to be a downer but D really in my eyes is missing that 
> "unique" feature that people care about, that allows people to 
> blog about the language...

I agree with the others that having no major company behind DLang 
is not helping from a money/resource/exposure point of view.  
That said, there must be things we can do as a community to help 
improve the situation.

I can imagine for example that the community could focus on 
particular sectors where D excels, and create as much quality 
content as possible about how to use D to solve problems in those 
areas. Moreover having a push to get articles into the 
blogosphere and social media would do wonders.

Coming from a web development background (PHP), I think D is a 
wonderful language.  It's expressive, elegant, performant and 
fun.  Based on my experience, I think web development is one of 
those sectors where D could become more popular.

Expanding on web development using D, I must say that Vibe.d is a 
pleasure to work with and once the new release of Vibe.d is fully 
optimised, it should stack up favourably over using a PHP 
framework in terms of performance, memory consumption and 
scalability.  However if you're not a D programmer and you're 
looking at the vibe.d website for the first time, you'd probably 
leave for a few reasons without trying it. To address that I 
would recommend the following:

- Vibe.d has built in Redis and Mongo drivers which is excellent, 
but it may not be immediately obvious that you can in-fact work 
with MySQL and Postgres easily.  This is very important to many 
developers, and hence having a clear nav/menu item that links to 
a tutorial or two on the vibe.d website about integrating with 
those databases would be very useful to put that objection to bed.

- Once it's appropriate, do some benchmarks that compares D to 
PHP frameworks such as Slim, Silex, Lumen for common 
functionality such as CRUD operations with sessions, JSON 
serialisation etc, linking to the D code for reference.  Assuming 
D is easily the winner, really highlight the results.  Ultimately 
handling more requests on a single machine means money saved once 
web apps start scaling.

- Have some tutorials about using JS frameworks such as 
React/Angular/Vue.js and CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap and 
Foundation with Vibe.d.  Obviously these really aren't directly 
related to D or Vibe.d, it helps to show that D can be used 
easily for solutions using those technologies.

- Improving the vibe.d website look and feel, and having some 
clear and bold messaging on the home page about why you should 
use it.

Cheers.