On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 08:31:15 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 03:04:30 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 19:52:44 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
What you need a blog post saying the GC has been made 4x
faster. Stuff like that, hey we made D much better now, not
stuff about some corporate user who does targeted advertising.
If you look through the blog, you'll find posts like that. One
of the most-viewed is titled, 'Find Was Too Damn Slow, So We
Fixed It' [1]. There are a variety of posts that we've
published. I started the series on Funkwerk last year because
we needed more posts about D being used in production.
Im not trying to be negative but if Nim or Rust released a blog
post saying "We made find faster" is it going to get you to try
them out?
That is the wrong question to be asking. It isn't how branding
works (just because D doesn't try and manufacture an image
doesn't mean that that itself doesn't create a brand). A post
like that is one element in a campaign that gets across what D is
like as a language and a community. I would guess many people
that have no attention of trying D might read that because it's
an interesting topic covered in an interesting way. By far not
every post needs to be a call to action, and in fact people that
try to do that become extremely annoying and get filtered out.
That's an old-fashioned approach to marketing that I don't think
works today.
Is it enough of an enticement to get over you preconceptions
about those languages and to think maybe they are worth a try?
I think the relevant question is at the margin of activation
energy - the person poised on the edge, not the representative
Reddit or Hacker News poster.
D is a very practical general-purpose language, and that means
most users over time will be in enterprises given that I guess
most code is written in enterprises (or maybe academe - and lots
of academic code isn't really open-sourced even if it perhaps
should be). Large enterprises aren't going to be early adopters
of things they didn't create themselves. And people in SMEs have
a different calculus from the representative influential person
that talks publicly about technology. Have you noticed too how
people that actually use D in their business don't spend much
time on forums?
That's what Im trying to say. Im sure posts like that are
popular within the D community but they are not going to make
much headway bringing new users in.
I disagree. I started using D before the blog, but it was that
kind of thing that drew me in, and one way and another as a
consequence more new users than me have been brought in.
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.
I think there is lots interesting happening. Dpp (No more manual
writing of bindings); Android aarch64; web assembly; continuing
improvements in C++ interop; Symmetry Autumn of Code; D running
in Jupyter (it excites me, even if nobody else); opMove; the
take-off of Weka (from what I have heard); Binderoo generating C#
wrappers for D programmatically; a really quite useful betterC
(you can use a lot of language and library now); betterC version
of Phobos will keep growing thanks to Seb's work on testing;
no-gc exceptions; DIP1000 and scope; LDC fuzzing and
profile-guided optimisation; GDC moving towards inclusion in GCC
finally; adoption of D in bioinformatics; other games companies
following in Remedy's footsteps. I haven't even had time to
follow forums or github much, but that's all just off the top of
my head.
