On Friday, 8 December 2017 at 22:22:14 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
(Abscissa) wrote:
On 12/08/2017 05:53 AM, Chris wrote:
Yep. D seems to be quite popular in Europe. I wonder why that
is, given that it originated in the USA and people in the
States are more open to new technologies. What were the
technical and social factors at work here? Maybe D wasn't
fancy enough to be taken seriously in the USA and maybe people
from outside the USA (not only in Europe) looked at it and
said "Hold on, that's something interesting...and we can
contribute to it." D certainly struck a chord with many
programmers around the globe, but what is it exactly? (Please
no jokes about D major or D minor chords now ;)
Speaking as a US citizen, it's long been my observation that
americans (and I only mean collectively, of course, it's
difficult to generalize down to individuals since that varies
greatly) tend to be far more conservative than one would assume
them to be.
Just as one example: The various genres of electronic music.
Always succeeded far better in europe than they ever did the
US. Americans would hear it and just bitch about "soulless",
"doesn't require musical talent" and other such [nonsence]. But
turn on (for example) BBC's Top Gear and they had recognizable
Prodigy, Crystal Method, etc all over the place. And heck, most
of Fluke's catalog isn't even available in the US. That sort of
stuff just doesn't sell very well over here. Americans like
their "three main acoustic cords" and steady simple 4/4 beats.
Even "silicon vally" isn't quite so much "open to new
technology" as it is driven primarily by buzz and popularity.
And then there's the last presidential election, which, and I
don't mean this to be snarky, just honest observation: it
clearly demonstrated there's far more white
tra...*cough*...umm..."ultra-conservatives" here than anyone
ever thought.
From what I hear, we're one of the few remaining industrialized
nations that has capital punishment. Whether that's good/bad is
completely beside the point here, the point being: Either way,
it's undeniably conservative.
Despite perhaps tipping my hand a bit, I really don't mean any
of that as ranting at all, just illustrating that it DOES make
sense that europe would be more open to D than the US:
Because the US *is* paradoxically much more conservative than
one would expect from a relatively young country that produces
as much software and electronics as it does. Whether that
conservativeness is good/bad/other is open to opinion, but
either way, it is what it is, and I think D's higher rate of
success elsewhere can be traced to that.
There are interesting stuff in your comment but i think we're
going off-topic.
Let's no go too far, the point, initially, is that survey is not
good.
In no way it should be used to split ourselves.