On Monday, 7 May 2018 at 15:52:38 UTC, David J Kordsmeier wrote:
On Monday, 7 May 2018 at 10:27:32 UTC, Joakim wrote:
[...]
Great marketing beats great tech (sadly), but we are creatures
subject to social influence and that which is shiny.
Who actually runs marketing for Dlang? Is it the foundation,
collective cooperation, or ? Does Dlang have what it needs to
be successful in this category in terms of financial resources,
expertise, and focus?
As an aside, this was the original marketing for Node.js, in
the years before it was acquired by Joyent:
http://tinyclouds.org/ . In a single year, it caught fire
(that is, it became wildly successful) because it had a strong
BDFL (who was not a dictator, and who stepped down as soon as
it made sense to do so, and he took on some messianic stature
as a result), strong technical merits, a clear focused message
of where it fit in the market, and it met a need. In fact, it
met many more needs than intended, widely used in both cloud
and embedded type applications. 8 years on from moving the
project into the hands of a corporate sponsor, through much
controversy over governance and some community strife, forks,
etc., it's doing well in the hands of a foundation:
https://foundation.nodejs.org/ .
From a market focused perspective there is the technology
itself in one bucket, and then there is the adoption by
enterprise. Certain things have to happen for enterprise
adoption to actually take place. If we follow the pattern of
what happened for Go or Node.js, we can boil those down to
execution of certain tangibles:
- Project is well documented
- Project is available under favorable OSS license (I won't get
into what favorable means, but for corporations, they have
their preferences)
- Project has a good toolchain and tools support
- Project has a good IDE integration
- Project has good sample applications built, lots of good
examples
- Project has a strong and active community of developers with
the appropriate mix of core contributors, external
contributors, experts, casual users, and people evaluating
possible use
- Project has strong technical merits
- Project has strong market differentiators (this may require
real marketing to get this down on paper and promote this)
- Project has commercial support available (training, bug
fixing, development)
- Project has an academic community (this often helps seed use
in Universities), and students eventually grow up to work for
enterprise corporations
- Project has corporate sponsors (or foundation sponsors ...
they are really representing corporations)
- Project has a sustainable model (legal, financial) to
maintain its community, engineering, and marketing.
- Project has multiple big projects that rely upon it
Grade Go, Rust, and Node.js on this list above. Where are they
at on each item? Grade Dlang on this. We still have some work
to do. What companies offer commercial support in D? Are
there any Dlang focused agencies out there? How many projects
are using Dlang commercially? Who are the corporate sponsors
of Dlang? Again, I think much of this comes back to that
marketing message. What is the unique selling proposition.
Define that. Then conquer the world.
Those are mostly things that have to be done collectively in a
community project like this. Much has already been done: the
front page of the website has a slogan, "Fast code, fast," and a
list of companies using D.
D is never going to have a completely structured process like a
well-organized company, where it defines those objectives and
then pays to get them done. As a community project, it's much
more decentralized, which has its pros and cons, but more
positives for me than being backed by a single company.
However, what the community leaders can do is put out a strategic
vision, for the community to gather around if they accept it. The
vision document is a great example of this, where anyone can pick
items off that list and go work on them.
However, an overall strategy is broader than that, which someone
could further by working on something _not on that list_, that
they think up themselves.
