On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 15:47:06 UTC, Chris wrote:
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.
Most developers are either not interested in choosing their own
tools, or know they're not smart enough to do so. Instead, they
rely on the same mechanism as most consumers, social proof, ie do
what everybody else in your field is doing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof
D is still in the innovators and early adopters stage of the tech
adoption lifecycle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle
To break out to an early majority, D will have to prove itself,
ie the innovators and early adopters have to show empirically
that it is working better for them and allowing them to do more.
Sociomantic would be a good success story to point at, though the
fact they're still on D1 hurts that story.
This is why I keep saying D needs a killer app to break out and
garner attention so it spreads wider. An example would be how
the success of Whatsapp brought more attention to Erlang.
Barring that, a bunch of nice libraries on dub that get attention
might work too. One is a home run, the other is a bunch of
singles, to use a baseball analogy.
I'm hoping that once D is on mobile, it will prove fertile
terrain and flourish there. I think more could be done to
publicize it as a good language on the server, that scales well
and is much easier to develop with.
There will need to be a paid toolchain at some point, to spur
more development and more manpower on sanding down the rough
edges of the tools. That's a chicken-and-egg situation right
now, as there might not be enough devs and businesses making
money off D to pay for such tools yet.
