GSoC Mentor Summit Observations and D Marketing

[dsimcha]

I wanted to thank the D community for getting us involved in GSoC and 
giving me the opportunity to attend the Mentor Summit, which was this 
weekend.  I was pleasantly surprised to find out that most hardcore 
programmers have at least heard of D by now, at least if the Mentor 
Summit was a representative sample of hardcore programmers that I had 
never talked to before.  There seemed to be substantial interest in it 
from the informal conversations I had over meals, etc.

I got the impression that D is not being used partly because of the 
obvious reasons (lack of libraries, legacy code in other languages) but 
also partly because most people, even if they've heard of it, don't know 
what its most important features/benefits are.  I think that we need to 
develop a short, memorable "elevator speech" version of its selling 
points, even if we ignore some substantial areas in doing so.  The one I 
used was basically "compile-time metaprogramming on steroids, static if, 
CTFE, string mixins, see std.algorithm, std.range and std.parallelism 
for examples".

I was also frequently asked about D's compatibility with C and C++.  The 
impression I get is that we would do well to highlight our ease of 
integrating with C more in our marketing, especially now that we have 
Deimos.

BTW, Fawzi Mohammed was also at the Mentor Summit and may have 
additional comments.  I'd be interested to see him weigh in on this thread.