[OT] Leverage Points

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 08:31:15 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 03:04:30 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>> On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 19:52:44 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> What you need a blog post saying the GC has been made 4x 
>>> faster. Stuff like that, hey we made D much better now, not 
>>> stuff about some corporate user who does targeted advertising.
>>
>> If you look through the blog, you'll find posts like that. One 
>> of the most-viewed is titled, 'Find Was Too Damn Slow, So We 
>> Fixed It' [1]. There are a variety of posts that we've 
>> published. I started the series on Funkwerk last year because 
>> we needed more posts about D being used in production.


> Im not trying to be negative but if Nim or Rust released a blog 
> post saying "We made find faster" is it going to get you to try 
> them out?

That is the wrong question to be asking.  It isn't how branding 
works (just because D doesn't try and manufacture an image 
doesn't mean that that itself doesn't create a brand).  A post 
like that is one element in a campaign that gets across what D is 
like as a language and a community.  I would guess many people 
that have no attention of trying D might read that because it's 
an interesting topic covered in an interesting way.  By far not 
every post needs to be a call to action, and in fact people that 
try to do that become extremely annoying and get filtered out.  
That's an old-fashioned approach to marketing that I don't think 
works today.


> Is it enough of an enticement to get over you preconceptions 
> about those languages and to think maybe they are worth a try?

I think the relevant question is at the margin of activation 
energy - the person poised on the edge, not the representative 
Reddit or Hacker News poster.

D is a very practical general-purpose language, and that means 
most users over time will be in enterprises given that I guess 
most code is written in enterprises (or maybe academe - and lots 
of academic code isn't really open-sourced even if it perhaps 
should be).  Large enterprises aren't going to be early adopters 
of things they didn't create themselves.  And people in SMEs have 
a different calculus from the representative influential person 
that talks publicly about technology.  Have you noticed too how 
people that actually use D in their business don't spend much 
time on forums?


> That's what Im trying to say. Im sure posts like that are 
> popular within the D community but they are not going to make 
> much headway bringing new users in.

I disagree.  I started using D before the blog, but it was that 
kind of thing that drew me in, and one way and another as a 
consequence more new users than me have been brought in.

> But the extension of that is that you need to have something 
> enticing to write about and there seems to be very little 
> happening at the moment. DPP is probably the most interesting 
> thing happening atm.

I think there is lots interesting happening.  Dpp (No more manual 
writing of bindings); Android aarch64; web assembly; continuing 
improvements in C++ interop; Symmetry Autumn of Code; D running 
in Jupyter (it excites me, even if nobody else); opMove; the 
take-off of Weka (from what I have heard); Binderoo generating C# 
wrappers for D programmatically; a really quite useful betterC 
(you can use a lot of language and library now); betterC version 
of Phobos will keep growing thanks to Seb's work on testing; 
no-gc exceptions; DIP1000 and scope; LDC fuzzing and 
profile-guided optimisation; GDC moving towards inclusion in GCC 
finally; adoption of D in bioinformatics; other games companies 
following in Remedy's footsteps.  I haven't even had time to 
follow forums or github much, but that's all just off the top of 
my head.