On Sunday, 11 January 2015 at 16:02:59 UTC, Joakim wrote:
You may be right that nobody else in the _D_ community sees the value, but engineers are notorious for being ignorant of business and economics, so nothing unusual if that's the case.
Yeah, it seems to be a big deal. D may end up needing what it doesn't appear to have: some business genius to go along with its language design prowess. The "switching costs" are far too high right now. Even the ideal programming language could only be so much better than what already exists. I'm not a marketing expert (well, perhaps ipso facto), but I think that in order to prosper in the current climate D needs a better brand. "Modern convenience. Modeling power. Native efficiency."... isn't good enough. Not to disparage the effort that went into creating that slogan, but for one thing, it's not even honest, insofar as D does not yet provide modern convenience, as Manu Evans has so dishearteningly pointed out. (It's becoming painfully obvious that convenience is absolutely not about language - it's about ecosystem, and D simply doesn't have that yet.)
The most important thing about a brand is that you know who you are. D still doesn't know what it is yet, and so it hasn't found the need to create a brand that matches that identity.
In any case, D's license allows it, so I'm sure somebody will try out a hybrid model with a D compiler someday, or D will be obsoleted by a language that does.
I'm not managing a huge codebase, so I have nothing to lose by sticking with D!
