On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 12:19:48 UTC, Russel Winder
wrote:
Having just done a session at PyConUK 2015 aimed at weaning
people of
pure Python and into polyglot – Python with (C++|D|Chapel)
(there
should have been a Rust bit but…) – and as people probably
heard the D
bit was a bit embarrassing for me, I got some interesting
comments
during the rest of the conference.
The most important can be paraphrased as "I had heard of D but
as it was getting no traction, I never looked at it again."
This would seem to indicate that D really does need to have a
marketing campaign to show it does have traction and isn't just
a little ghetto as so many languages end up in. D's forays into
AAA games, finance, etc. all need to get permanent presence. In
this respect, Reddit is (almost) an irrelevance: bulk
perception is unaffected by Reddit, most programmers do not
even look at it, let alone follow it. It would be nice if Tiobe
and the like were an irrelevance, but that is less so.
Having active regional groups is a first important factor, and
that is happening, though perhaps less than would be good.
Having lots of projects on GitHub (and BitBucket) that get
noticed. Clearly everyone is fighting JavaScript, but that is
not an issue for D per se. Go, Rust, C++, C are the "enemy".
Maybe discuss this a bit at the coming London D Meeting – which
sadly clashes with the London Go Meeting…
I think a good project where D/Phobos would work great is a 3d
printer fw.
All 3d printer firmwares are written in c/c++.
3d printers' firmwares deal with a lot of algorithms / printer
architectures / components / multithreading where D + Phobos
would simplify the development. If you have ever checked 3d
printer firmware you know what I'm speaking of
