On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 04:48:09 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev
wrote:
On Wednesday, 21 November 2018 at 20:51:17 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
Unfortunately, you're right. The title will leave the
impression "D is slow at compiling". You have to carefully
read the article to see otherwise, and few will do that.
Sorry about that. I'll have to think of two titles next time,
one for the D community and one for everyone else.
If it's of any consolation, the top comments in both discussion
threads point out that the title is inaccurate on purpose.
Please don't get me wrong, it's an excellent article, a
provocative title, and fantastic work going on. I didn't meant to
hurt!
In my opinion language adoption is a seduction/sales process very
much like business-to-consumer is, the way I see it it's
strikingly similar to marketing B2C apps, unless there will be no
"impulse buy".
Actually no less than 3 programmer friends came to (I'm the
weirdo-using-D and people are _always_ in disbelief and invent
all sorts of reasons not to try) saying they saw an article on D
on HN, with "D compilation is slow", and on further examination
they didn't read or at best the first paragraph. But they did
remember the title. They may rationally think their opinion of D
hasn't changed: aren't we highly capable people?
I'm not making that up! So why is it a problem ?
HN may be the only time they hear about D. The words of the title
may be their only contact with it. The first 3 words of the title
may be the only thing associated with the "D language" chunk in
their brain.
The associative mind doesn't know _negation_ so even a title like
"D compilation wasn't fast so I forked the compiler" is better
from a marketing point of view since it contains the word "fast"
in it! That's why marketing people have the annoying habit of
using positive words, you may think this stuff is unimportant but
this is actually the important meat.
Reasonable people may think marketing and biases don't apply to
them but they do, it works without your consent.
