On Tuesday, 23 December 2014 at 07:57:22 UTC, Bienlein wrote:
What I'm saying is that being good at everything is good, but only a true selling point would receive people's attention. That's the way it is. Making D fit for server side development is a suggestion of mine. It seems to me something that has traction and will continue to have so unless the Internet dies a sudden death. There might be other even better ideas what could be selling points, but continuing with being good at everything and hoping that one day a big spender will come along might in the end not work out and result in a great loss of time. I don't want to appear harsh. It only seems to me that I wasn't able to bring my point across.
You have a point that from a marketing/deployment perspective it is better to focus on one niche and do well there, then expand outwards, a point Ola has made before. It is tougher to get potential users to focus on quality across the board, rather than one unique selling point, as you say.
But D has a much more ambitious goal, to be a better general-purpose programming language. That has already been focused on the server to some extent, with vibe.d and the success of Sociomantic's real-time ad platform. The problem with starting in a niche is that you can get too optimized for that niche and have trouble undoing those decisions later to become more general-purpose. Is there any realistic chance that Go ever takes on a more general-purpose language like C++? Probably not.
Walter and Andrei know what they're doing, but they need help building that vision, especially given the quality of implementation issues everyone is pointing out. Hopefully enough people agree with that vision that they pitch in to help build it. Success at building a general-purpose language will not come right away, but if and when it comes, it's much bigger and longer-lasting. :)
