On 3/12/14, 8:05 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 02:48:14 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 3/12/14, 5:40 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
From looking at the atmosphere in this newsgroup, at least to me it
appears obvious that there are, in fact, D users who would be glad to
have their D code broken if it means that it will end up being written
in a better programming language.
This is not my first gig. Due to simple social dynamics, forum
participation saturates. In their heydays, forums like
comp.lang.c++.moderated, comp.lang.tex, and comp.lang.perl had traffic
comparable to ours, although their community was 1-2 orders of
magnitude larger. Although it seems things are business as usual in
our little hood here, there is a growing silent majority of D users
who aren't on the forum.
So are you saying that the users who participate on the forum are not
representative of the entire D user base?
They are representative in the sense they're among the most passionate,
competent, and influential of the user base. For the same reasons they
are a couple of standard deviations away in certain respects from the
majority.
I.e. the % of users who
wouldn't mind breaking changes is higher on the forum?
I believe so, and I have many examples. Most people who don't hang out
in the forum just want to get work done without minding every single
language advocacy subtlety, and breakages prevent them from getting work
done.
Andrei
