On Monday, 26 November 2018 at 16:00:36 UTC, Guillaume Piolat
wrote:
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".
I think that there are different strategies - decent appeal to a
broad market and having a very high appeal to a small market (but
there has better be something good about your potential customer
base ie 'D, if you find VBA too difficult' is probably not a good
strategy!). And you probably don't get to pick which situation
you are in, and then one had better realise it and play the game
you're in. The particular kind of market will shape what works -
in my business you approach a retail client base differently from
regular institutional investors and then the worlds' largest
pools of money involved something else again.
D isn't really marketed and it's definitely not sold. That's an
implicit strategy in itself.
Nassim Taleb raises the question of how do you choose between two
surgeons, both recommended. One looks the part and hangs his
many certificates on his office wall. The other looks scruffy
with the appearance of a tradesman. Who do you pick? Taleb says
pick the guy who doesn't look the part because if he got there
without signalling he must have something going for him.
But in general you can appeal on merits mostly to an audience
that is highly discerning and very capable. If you haven't got
any money to appeal to an audience that judges based on
heuristics and social factors well then you can try to avoid
accidentally putting people off, you can be creative with
guerilla marketing but the key thing is to make the most of what
you got. If everyone else does things a certain way then if for
some reason that's closed off to you for now then if you look
closely, with active perception,you may well see opportunities
that are neglected to approach the problem another way.
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?
It doesn't matter what most people think. It matters what people
who are on the fence or using D already a bit think. Or people
who have a lot of problems to which D is in part a solution only
they didn't know about or think of D yet.
The messenger matters too. If someone you trust and rate highly
tells you something based on their experience that counts for a
lot more than all the blog posts in the world. And working code
and lived experience dominates the social talk about it.
I've talked about D with the CTO of Bloomberg, the outgoing COO
of Barclays investment bank, the number two guy at a 30bn hedge
fund, the COO of the largest hedge fund in the world (depending
on how you count) and more. That's not going to change anything
tomorrow but in time those kinds of conversations matter much
more than what people might say on Reddit. It's not either /or of
course, but it's just not worth sweating your reviews.
Finally the reasons people buy things are not what you might
reasonably think! Ask Walter how he was able to compete
successfully for so long as a one man band with Microsoft. I
don't think his edge was in the beginning something calculated.
Reasonable people may think marketing and biases don't apply to
them but they do, it works without your consent.
The thing is that we had a bubble in synthetic manufactured
marketing. And now increasingly people are tired of that and
seek what's authentic, real and that doesn't pretend to be
perfect.
That doesn't mean a bit of thought is a bad idea,just that it
might matter less than you think that the D community isn't
particularly interested in marketing. Sometimes one can see that
hidden in what superficially seems to be a weakness is a strength.
