On Monday, 16 March 2015 at 08:33:43 UTC, Zach the Mystic wrote:
I see D attracting *really* good programmers, programmers from, let's say the 90-95th percentile in skill and talent in their field on average. By marketing to these programmers specifically -- that is, telling everyone that while D is for everyone, it is especially designed to give talented and experienced programmers the tools they need to get their work done -- even if you repel several programmers from, say, the 45th percentile or below in exchange for the brand loyalty of one from 92nd percentile or above, it's probably a winning strategy, because that one good programmer will get more done than all the rest combined.
Yep, this is what I meant by my Blackberry analogy earlier in this thread. Blackberry used to own the smartphone market, when it was limited to professionals who emailed and texted a lot. When the market broadened to include everyone, they decided to go the popular route and sell touch-screen phones without physical keyboards like everyone else. It was a disaster, from which they're only recently recovering by offering physical keyboards again. I'm not saying it _had_ to fail, only that RIM clearly didn't have what it took to succeed there.
Similarly, D's never going to do very well with programmers who don't care about the efficiency of their code: simpler, slower languages like python or ruby have that niche sewn up. The best we can do is point out that if you're already here for the advanced features, it can also be used for scripting and the like. And of course, we should always strive to make things as easy as we can for both small and large projects, including better documentation.
One day, the tide may turn towards native efficiency again, say because of mobile or more people writing code that runs on large server clusters, and D will be well-positioned to benefit if and when that happens.
