On Saturday, 12 July 2014 at 10:27:12 UTC, Russel Winder via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
In the end it is about community rather than the programming
language
per se. Java created a huge community that was evangelical. Go
has
rapidly created an active community that is evangelical. Python
has
rapidly created a large evangelical community. D has slowly
created a
small community that hasn't as yet created the outward looking
evangelical aspect. Where are the user groups having local
meetings is
my main metric. Java definitely, Go definitely, C++ sort of, D
no. This
is the real problem for D I feel. Without local user groups
meeting up
you don't get exposure and you don't get traction in the market.
This seems like an outdated way of looking at things. I've never
attended a user group in my life, yet I've picked up several
technologies since I left college a while back. When I found out
that such user groups existed, I thought they were kind of
quaint, a remnant of pre-internet times.
As for an evangelical community, did C and C++ have those? I
don't think anyone was ever really evangelical about Obj-C as it
took off over the last couple years, riding on the coattails of
the meteoric rise of iOS. Evangelism can help, but it can be
more a sign of the evangelist's enthusiasm than a tech worth
using. Maybe D isn't ready for evangelism yet, there's something
to be said for getting the product in gear before advertising it.
Not saying there's anything wrong with DUGs, higher bandwidth
interaction and all, but the current approach of D developers
giving talks at outside gatherings or putting DConf talks online
seems like a much better way to spread the gospel to me.
Certainly both can be done, I just wouldn't use DUGs as the main
metric.
I've said it a couple times before, but it bears repeating: what
D needs is a killer app. Rails showed the ease of use of ruby.
iOS made Obj-C a star. D needs to show its utility by spawning a
similar killer app, that's what will prove its worth in the
market. We can't know what that will be, but if D is any good,
it will probably happen at some point.
