Take a look on this discussion thread and you know WHY D IS NOT
SO POPULAR.
The community discusses technical details and compares D to C++,
but there is no clear mission statement, there is no vision
statement and no marketing.
Often you merchandise D as a "system programming language", but
the market for "system programming language" is tiny.
D offers so much more, it is the most mature "modern" compiler
language with thread-local first principle, which makes it to the
best choice for modern server programming projects. It's meta
programing facilities gives you a rich base for high level large
scale business application projects. Its embedded testing, the
module concept ... are great for large scale projects.
I want to use D in an in-house project for a while, but D's
marketing is so bad, that it is nearly impossible to convince the
management. They feel, that D is instable (much to high version
frequency), D is only "a kind of C++" and has no own ecosystem,
and there is no (commercial) support.
From my point of view you need to get out of "systems programming
language" niche and have to avoid the never ending public detail
discussion. Try to position D as THE all purpose programming
language for bigger teams. Do better documentation, update
Andrei's book so that it is THE BOOK OF D. Maybe you have to
split dlang.org into one site facing your customers (as me) and
one (more internal) site for discussions and further developement.
Change your release-concept in that way, that you have
LTS-releases for your customers (as me) and more experimental
releases for your compiler/lib-developer community.
And do marketing, marketing, marketing. Give talks, write (enrty
level) articles for popular magazines ..
Regards
Markus
