How programmers transition between languages

[bachmeier]

On Sunday, 28 January 2018 at 13:50:03 UTC, Michael wrote:
> Most people at my university, outside of the computer science 
> department, that are using languages like Python and R and 
> MATLAB the most, are very aware of Rust and Go, but not D.

I'd say Julia is getting a lot more attention than Rust or Go for 
those users. And rightfully so.

> I wonder if we do need to pay more attention to attracting new 
> users just to get people talking about it.

I'm not sure why those users would be interested in D at the 
moment. D presents itself as a C++ replacement, discussions are 
all about low-level stuff, garbage collection, and efficiency, 
and new users are told to use Dub and learn about Git submodules. 
That's not ever going to appeal to the R and Matlab crowd. I have 
gotten others to start using D, and it was quite easy. Just make 
an R package containing D code, they install it, and then they 
call D functions from R. Few in this community understand that 
style of programming though.