On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 04:46:35 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 18:49:53 UTC, Joakim wrote:
On Saturday, 18 August 2018 at 13:33:43 UTC, Andrei
Alexandrescu wrote:
A friend recommended this article:
http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
I found it awesome and would recommend to anyone in this
community. Worth a close read - no skimming, no tl;rd etc.
The question applicable to us - where are the best leverage
points in making the D language more successful.
I read the whole thing, pretty much jibes with what I've
already realized after decades of observation, but good to see
it all laid out and prioritized, as Jonathan said.
I thought this paragraph was particularly relevant to D:
"So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the
seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a
lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the
anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming
yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you
insert people with the new paradigm in places of public
visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries;
rather you work with active change agents and with the vast
middle ground of people who are open-minded."
This pretty much reflects what Laeeth always says about
finding principals who can make their own decisions about
using D. "Places of public visibility and power" for D are
commercial or open-source projects that attract attention for
being well done or at least popular.
Read Vilfredo Pareto on the circulation of the elites, Toynbee
on the role of creative minorities, and Ibn Khaldun on
civilisational cycles.
There's not much point focusing on the influential and powerful
people and projects of today - they have too much else going
on; powerful people tend to become a bit disconnected from
reality, complacent and they and hangers-on have too much
vested in the status quo to change. When you have nothing, you
have not much to lose, but after considerable success most
people start to move to wanting to keep what they have. This
doesn't bring open-mindedness to new ideas or approaches.
Sure, and though I've not read any of those books, where did I
suggest going after the "influential and powerful?" I simply
echoed your statement about going after principals who are free
to make their own path, who as you've stated before are usually
at startups or small projects where everything doesn't have to
get past a committee.
But we live in a dynamic economy and time and the winners of
tomorrow might look unremarkable today. Linus said it was just
a hobby project, nothing big like Minix. Would you have
thought a few German PhDs had a chance with no capital,
starting amidst a bad financial crisis and using a language
that was then of questionable stability and commercial
viability?
Yes, the next great kernel developer or Sociomantic is looking
for the language to write their project with now. Hopefully, D
will be the right choice for them.
I'm not sure we're doing a good job of publicizing those we
have though, here's a comment from the proggit thread on
BBasile's recent post about writing a language in D:
"I keep seeing articles telling me why D is so great, but
nothing of note ever gets written in D."
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/97q9sq/comment/e4b36st
I don't think it matters a lot what people like that think. In
aggregate yes, but as Andrei says people are looking for an
excuse not to learn a new language. Somebody actually ready to
try D will sooner or later come across the organisations using
D page and see that the situation is a bit different.
Looking at his proggit comment history now, he seems exactly like
the kind of intelligent, opinionated sort D should be attracting:
I don't think he was looking to dismiss D. He could have looked
harder, we could have marketed harder: there's blame to go around.
I'll put out an email to Don. Maybe Laeeth would be willing to
do an interview.
Sounds a good idea.
Alright, I'll email you soon.
On the OSS front, I've sent several interview questions to
Iain earlier this year about gdc, after he agreed to an
interview, no responses yet. Tough to blame others for being
ignorant of D's successes when we don't do enough to market it.
I think we are still in very early stages. Lots of companies
in orgs using D I don't know much about. The Arabia weather
channel have a YouTube on their use of D, but I don't speak
Arabic. Hunt the Chinese toy company is interesting. Chinese
tech scene is huge and very creative, possibly more so than the
US in some ways.
You might ask EMSI and also AdRoll.
By early days I mean it's better to look for interesting
stories where people are doing real work on a small scale with
D than trying to find super impressive success stories only.
We're doing both: most of the material on the D blog and my own D
interviews are not with corporate representatives. We could stand
for more of the latter though, especially the big successes,
because people are more influenced by them.
Many devs use large corporate deployments as a litmus test of
whether they should explore a new tech. To the extent that we've
never published a blog post about Weka, only offhand mentions
like when Andrei visited Israel, that is a big marketing failure
for D.
I know the Weka guys are very busy, but the further success of D
will only help them too, so they're undercutting themselves by
not making sure that blog post gets done.
Finally, regarding leverage, I keep pointing out that mobile
has seen a resurgence of AoT-compiled native languages, but
nobody seems to be trying D out in that fertile terrain, other
than me.
I did try, but it's not exactly easy to make a complete app in
D, even on Android. It would be great if there were some way
to automatically wrap the APIs.
Right now, the Android port is more suited for writing some
performant libraries that run as part of an existing Android app.
The kind of polish you're looking for will only come with early
adopters pitching in to smooth out those rough edges.
On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 08:31:15 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
But the extension of that is that you need to have something
enticing to write about and there seems to be very little
happening at the moment. DPP is probably the most interesting
thing happening atm.
How about this? The latest release of ldc, 1.11, is the first one
to ship with a mostly working AArch64 port, which is the most
widely used CPU architecture for personal computing these days as
it powers billions of mobile devices (most iOS devices and about
half of Android devices). This is the culmination of years of
patches worked on by core devs on the ldc and gdc teams- David,
Ian, Kai, Johannes, and so on- to which I recently added the
Android portions.
I'm now able to write and compile D executables _on_ my 5.5"
Android/AArch64 smartphone using ldc 1.11, the same device on
which I'm writing this long forum post, using a bluetooth
keyboard. I've kicked off a build using the Termux build scripts
and will soon be submitting a pull so you can do the same on your
Android phone or tablet, after running this simple command in the
Termux app for Android, `apt install ldc`:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.termux&hl=en
I'll start writing up a post for the D blog about the Android
port, after I edit the wiki page to show how to build for
Android/AArch64 too:
https://wiki.dlang.org/Build_D_for_Android
