On 20/02/2017 1:25 AM, timmyjose wrote:
On Tuesday, 20 December 2016 at 15:42:16 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
On Tuesday, 20 December 2016 at 15:17:56 UTC, Benjiro wrote:
I do not recall seeing on the C++ and other forums this constant
attitude from fix it yourselves or put it in the libraries or ... Its
mostly on the smaller languages where they lack people. And at the
same time, that is a very scary though for companies who want to use
a language.
I think it's important to be realistic. One of D's limitations is that
it does not have the money of Microsoft or Intel behind it, and it
does not have hundreds of billion-dollar corporations depending on it
for critical business operations. Volunteer organizations will be run
differently from outfits that have large budgets to pay people to do
the ugly work. This is not an excuse, it is simply the current state
of affairs.
I'm completely new to the D scene, but I do want to make a comment here.
One of the reasons why a language like Rust is seeing a surge in
popularity is because the core team in Mozilla are evangelising it like
you wouldn't believe it. Rust is a fairly old language, and yet the way
they present it would fool anybody new to the language. Some things I
noticed about their approach (having been part of the community for a
little while) -
1). Have a nifty, minimalistic website (D has a pretty good website as
well, but I feel it is a bit overwhelming for newbies).
2). Present the core strengths of the language on the main page itself
in a brief sentence (even though they are more half-truths than anything
else).
3). They hired someone like Steve Klabnik to give talk after talk, and
no matter what you may think of him, he is very good at "connecting"
with the younger folks, and like it or not, the next generation is the
target audience that will decide if a language is succesful or not.
In my opinion (also based on posts that some D users have made on
the Rust user group), D is actually a much more coherent and powerful
language than Rust, but most people (including myself) wouldn't have
known about it on face value.
Self-promotion is something that needs to be done, and the Rust group is
very good at it. Go, on the other hand, benefits from the Google name,
of course. I doubt it would have had a quarter of its success just based
on Rob Pike's status and the merits of the language itself.
Also, community-building is something that absolutely needs to be done
to convince users to join in with fresh minds, and start building things
in the language. Only then will a community really flourish, no matter
how good or bad the language is.
4). Spam the tech arena - have tons of blogs floating around talking
about the "cool" features of the language while downplaying the
complexity hiding around the corner, have a very helpful IRC channel
where people answer even the silliest questions with a smile, and have
active forums and users on Reddit, HN, and the like.
We do try on our Freenode channel, but answering with a smile can be
quite hard. Especially when simple answers are ignored (I am definitely
guilty of this).
It really doesn't help that we only have one person with OP rights who
acts upon them. Its annoying since we get spammed every 6-8 months with
nothing we can do assuming no Freenode admins are on (this is very common!).
