On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 19:34:39 UTC, Manu wrote:
On Sun, 26 Aug 2018 at 12:10, RhyS via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 18:18:04 UTC, drug wrote:
> It's rather funny to see how one man who forced to program in
> programming language he doesn't like can triggers comments
> from
> lurkers that they don't like D too. No offense.
> D is in great form and is getting much better and better and
> I'd like to ask D community to continue their good work and
> make D great again.
Most people lurking here are people that WANT to use D but are
offset by the issues. D is not bad as a language but it has
issue. Their are issues at every step in the D eco system and
each of those create a barrier.
Its those same issues that never seem to get solved and are
secondary citizens compared to adding more "future" features
or trying to Up-one C++...
Its not BetterC or static if or whatever new feature of the
month, that brings in new people. You can advertise D as much
as you want, but when people download D and very few people
stay, is that not a hint...
The fact that only recently the D Poll pointed out that most
people are using VSC and not VS. I am like "what, you only
figure that out now". Given the mass popularity of VSC... That
alone tells you how much the mindset of D is stuck in a
specific eco space.
Industry tends to use VS, because they fork-out for the
relatively
expensive licenses.
I work at a company with a thousand engineers, all VS users, D
could
find home there if some rough edges were polished, but they
*absolutely must be polished* before it would be taken
seriously.
It is consistently expressed that poor VS integration is an
absolute
non-starter.
While a majority of people (hobbyists?) that take an online
poll in an
open-source community forum might be VSCode users, that doesn't
mean
VS is a poor priority target.
Is D a hobby project, or an industry solution? I vote the
latter. I
don't GAF about peoples hobbies, I just want to use D to _do my
job_.
Quality VS experience is critical to D's adoption in that
sector.
Those 1000 engineers aren't reflected in your poll... would you
like them to be?
Do you see a path from here to there that's planned?
I think it's very difficult winning over people that expect to
see the same degree of polish as in a project thats older and has
much more commercial support. In other words as a thought
experiment if everyone in the community were to stop and work
only on VS and debugging polish, how many years would it be
before your colleagues were willing to switch?
I think it might be a while.
I'm not suggesting that polish isn't worth working on, but one
might be realistic about what may be achieved.
I think D is a classic example of Clayton Christensen's
Innovators Dilemma. In the beginning a certain kind of
innovation starts at the fringe. It's inferior alongst some
dimensions compared to the products with high market share and so
it gets kind of ignored. But for some particular reasons it has
a very high appeal to some groups of people and so it keeps
growing mostly unnoticed and over tiny expands the niches where
it is used.
This can keep going for a long time. And then something in the
environment changes and it's like it becomes an overnight
success. For American cars it was the oil price shock of the
1970s. Japanese cars then might have been seen as inferior but
they were energy efficient and they worked.
I think it's possible that for D this will arise from the
interaction of data set sizes growing - storage prices drop at
40% a year and somehow people find a way to use that cheaper
storage - whilst processing power and memory latency and
bandwidth is a sadder tale. But it might be something else.
So people who say that there is no place for D in the kind of
work they do might sometimes be right. Frustrating because if
only the polish were there, but polish is a lot of work and not
everyone is interested in it. They might not be right about
broader adoption because the world is a very big place,most
people don't talk about their work, and because some of the
factors that present huge obstacles in some environments simply
don't apply in others.
Thinking about frustrations as an entrepreneurial challenge may
be ultimately more generative than just hoping someone will do
something. I do wonder if there isn't an opportunity in
organising people from the community to work on projects that
enterprise users would find valuable but that won't get done
otherwise. Organising the work might not be difficult, but it
takes time and attention, which enterprise users are not long on.
