On Sunday, 11 January 2015 at 19:27:15 UTC, Iain Buclaw via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
On 11 January 2015 at 16:23, Joakim via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
On Sunday, 11 January 2015 at 16:13:01 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
There are very few "monopolies" in software, essentially
none nowadays.
:D :D :D :D :D
I have not laughed so hard for quite a while. Modern IT
industry is
absolutely dominated by monopolies / oligopolies.
Hard to reason with you if this is what you see.
You should really try to keep up to date with recent market
share stats:
http://www.businessinsider.in/In-Case-You-Dont-Appreciate-How-Fast-The-Windows-Monopoly-Is-Getting-Destroyed-/articleshow/21123434.cms
Why should Monopoly automatically mean Microsoft? ;-)
It doesn't, it's just the only company he mentioned and the one
most think of. If you have another in mind, feel free to mention
it.
On Monday, 12 January 2015 at 04:17:11 UTC, Zach the Mystic wrote:
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 don't know about "genius," simply a small to mid-sized company
like Embarcadero that's willing to invest into putting 10-20 paid
devs on producing and selling a polished compiler/runtime/stdlib
would do.
I disagree that the ideal programming language would "only be so
much better:" we can do a _lot_ better than C++ and all its
legacy issues. D certainly makes a stab at it, but is missing
good commercial implementations like C++ has.
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.)
I don't have a problem with the brand. D is convenient enough
for me in terms of features, though I certainly don't push it as
far as Manu does. As for the library ecosystem, that's always a
slog to bootstrap for any new language.
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.
I'd argue that D knows what it is by now, but doesn't know how to
get it done, ie a volunteer project won't make any headway
against C++.
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!
Nor am I, I have no problem tinkering with a hobby language like
D in my spare time.
