On Friday, 14 December 2012 at 00:42:58 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Like any major user of a language, they want confidence in our full support of them. Asking them to use a patched or branch version of the compiler does not inspire confidence.
But nobody agreed here on supporting that ! It never was released !
What I'm doing is hardly unique in business history. When Boeing designed the 707, they showed the prototype to Pan Am, their biggest potential customer. Pan Am wanted a slightly wider fuselage. At enormous expense, Boeing threw out their tooling and built all new tooling and a new design, all just to make the sale to Pan Am. It paid off enormously for Boeing, because with Pan Am buying 707s, the other airlines all couldn't wait to buy them, too.
I'm pretty sure Boeing employee were informed and payed for that work. Here you have a community that is not informed and work on D on their free time.
When Westinghouse had AC and Edison had DC, they competed for the Niagra power project. Both knew that would be the lynchpin of their industry, and both did whatever it took to get that design win. Westinghouse got the contract, and that's why our electrical grid is 60 Hz AC.
Considering the physics constraints, DC isn't even an option. Having the contract at the time would have simply delayed electricity deployment like we know now.
Ok, we're not Boeing or Westinghouse. But we have an opportunity to go big time, and I'm not going to let that get away from us.
You'll go nowhere without a community.
