On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 12:54:39 UTC, Jakob Jenkov
wrote:
I really want to put these paid blogging ideas into use one
day, but maybe D isn't the place to do it.
Or - maybe D is exactly the right use case. D doesn't already
have a ton of available material, but still as a decent size
community.
Yes, D could always use more material, other than the books
available now. Whether it's done through my paid blogging ideas
or not will depend on how many D devs decide they'd like to try
writing for such a paid blog.
I'd say the hardest part is to get information about those
parts of D which are not documented. I find the D docs for
Phobos pretty hard to read. There are very few explanations to
the methods and classes.
The "read the code" dogma is not very helpful to beginners in a
new language or API.
I recommend Andrei and Ali's books for the language itself,
though they don't go much into phobos (still reading the free
chapter on ranges from Mike's book and have not read most of
Adam's book yet).
On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 15:28:34 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 03:05:46 UTC, Joakim wrote:
I've been thinking about contacting various D devs to see how
much interest there is- I mentioned that I contacted one guy
already- but I wasn't sure if I myself wanted to put time into
this. I really want to put these paid blogging ideas into use
one day, but maybe D isn't the place to do it.
I don't think it would be worth your time to focus on D in
general. If you want someone to pay more than a couple dollars
a year, you need to offer something specific, and it needs to
offer a direct, immediate career benefit. Web development with
D might work if done right. Probably the better thing is to go
into it with a low price and a goal of learning. Then you can
move on to a more profitable market.
I was thinking of focusing on more advanced usage of D, ie the
new idioms that D makes available with its specific constructs
and libraries, maybe supplemented with posts for intermediate
users. I don't think there's such a book now, as they
understandably focus on new or inexperienced users.
I don't think D can offer a "direct, immediate career benefit,"
as you can't use D in most workplaces. I'm skeptical that D will
ever do well in web development, as no AoT-compiled language
garners much share (maybe Go has gotten a little recently).
Rather, the goal would be a site for hobbyists to learn how to
use the language to its fullest, without having to dive into the
source and github PRs to extract all that info themselves.
Obviously, learning D might indirectly benefit someone in their
career, by learning new concepts from D that other languages
don't employ, but that's not direct or immediate.
The prices would be low- I mentioned a $5-10 paid balance- but
more importantly pay as you use, ie metered. So if someone found
a lot of use, it would be possible for them to spend $50 or more
in a year. Someone else might just read an article or two
occasionally, and only end up using $1-2 from their balance. I
believe such metered models are the endgame online, crazy to me
that almost nobody is doing it yet, decades after it's been
possible.
