Interesting Observation from JAXLondon

[Peter Alexander]

On Friday, 12 October 2018 at 07:13:33 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Thu, 2018-10-11 at 13:00 +0000, bachmeier via Digitalmars-d 
> wrote: […]
>> Suggestions?
>> 
>> My guess is that the reason they've heard of those languages 
>> is because their developers were writing small projects using 
>> Go and Rust, but not D.
>
> I fear it may already be too late.
>
> [...]

I don't think it's ever too late. Python was stagnant for a long 
time but exploded in popularity in recent years due to Pandas, 
TensorFlow, SciPy etc.  Similar things have happened in other 
languages, and it can happen for D.

The technical differences between languages is mostly immaterial 
as well IMO. Plenty of awful languages have succeeded despite 
being really terrible for the domain they won. As long as there 
are libraries and integrations that help solve a problem, people 
will use them. PHP is the obvious example here. R is another.

As long as D continues to be a nice language to work in for 
hobbyists, there will always be potential for a killer use case 
to come along. D just needs to make sure it doesn't piss off its 
fans. vibe.d happened because a single person was a fan of D. You 
don't need a lot of marketing for that to happen. Maybe vibe.d 
hasn't been the killer app for D, but the next thing might be, so 
you just need fans.

I do believe in "Build it and they will come", but "it" needs to 
be something of value. At the moment, the "it" of D on its own 
just isn't valuable enough. Lots of marketing without a strong 
value proposition will just be a waste of effort.