On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 12:19:48 UTC, Russel Winder
wrote:
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."
Sad but true. Developers want better tools, but don't even look
at them, unless you hype them. No wonder mediocre but well-hyped
languages could be so successful. The sad thing is that one would
have thought that developers are a bit wiser than the average
consumer when it comes to choosing their tools.
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".
I wouldn't call them D's "enemies". The difference is that
languages like Go are designed to get as many users on board as
possible in order to lock them in and create dependencies (like
proprietary operating systems, OS X or MS Windows). D's
philosophy is different, it genuinely wants to offer a good tool
that everyone can use without trying to lock anyone in. I'm no
longer sure, if marketing would make a big difference. We're up
against
a) billions of dollars:
big corporations (cf. Go) and the Java/C++/C# industry that
makes millions selling training courses and books etc.
b) the general inertia and herd behavior of people, and to make
the herd move you need a)
