On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 02:30:42 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
On Wednesday, August 14, 2013 22:56:30 Andre Artus wrote:
As with many things it depends on what you want to achieve.
Answering on SO is as much about establishing awareness as it
is
about answering the question. For a newcomer to D StackOverflow
may be their first port of call, if questions go unanswered, or
are answered after long delays, then the likelihood of the
person
persisting with D is diminished.
I answer questions on SO all the time, but I rarely ask
anything there, and I
never ask anything D-related there. Of course, if my question
is D-related,
I'm much more likely to _have_ to ask my question here to get a
good answer
anyway just based on how many people would even know the
answer, simply
because I know enough that anything I asked would be much more
likely to be
esoteric and/or require in-depth knowledge. The experts are all
here, and only
a small portion of them are on SO.
In any case, I'd say that in general, asking your question on
SO gives it more
visibility to those outside of the core D community, but you're
more likely to
get a good answer here than there, because there are more
people here, and
this is where the experts are.
- Jonathan M Davis
I agree with every point you've made here. If I had a D related
question I would not head for SO first. I have found a lot in the
D forums without actually having to ask the questions myself. But
it does not do much for D's exposure.
Evangelizing takes planning and effort. Technical merit is
unfortunately insufficient to guarantee success in the
marketplace of ideas. I have known about D for quite some time,
but did not put too much effort into it until recently. It's when
I stumbled across the DConf2013 videos that I realized that there
is some serious legs under D. The quality of the presentations
(in terms of content over glitz) exceeded that of many similar
conferences I've seen.
Languages like Ruby, Python, PHP, R, etc. do not have the buzz
they do because of inherent technical merit, but perhaps in spite
of thereof. Each has some killer framework compelling you to
adopt the language in order to benefit from it, and people
putting serious effort into evangelizing and lowering the
barriers.
I see there is a thread going on creating D GUI framework, I
think that would be a major step towards lowering the barriers.
It needs to be part of a "batteries included" set-up for D. So
you can download D and run your Hello World GUI app in under 10
minutes. Not spend half the day searching for mostly abandoned
efforts and then spending the rest of the day compiling the C/C++
dependencies only later to find that you have been sucked into
the 7th layer of Dependency Hell. While modern C++ has become a
lot less unpleasant it is still unpleasant; someone new to D
should never have to run a C/C++ compiler for any reason other
than to compare compilation time (with a big fat grin on their
dial for choosing D).
