On 11/10/11 2:01 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
Without a properly financed and orchestrated marketing campaign to push D out there to the C, C++ and Fortran crowd and/or a group of people who could be the "killer audience", and then for there to be serious take up, D remains a 10+ year old niche experiment with no mainline future.
That would help, but I'm not sure that that would be a necessity. There are languages that are doing well without massive marketing (Perl, Ruby, Python).
I am now getting more and more requests for Python training from hard core C++ folk, they are not asking for D training. So on current statistics Python is successful and D is not. I would be very happy to have to construct D training courses because there was a good client base. On current evidence I won't hold my breath.
I'm offering training on D in addition to C++ and Machine Learning, but so far there were no requests for D.
Anyhow, I think you're making good points (quite self-evident to me). One simple amend I'd make is that at the end of the day clearly D must be a solid technical offering (something that we've recently made very good progress on), and inevitably the quality of the language, libraries, and tools, will be compared against competing languages. Slagging off other languages for not doing e.g. concurrency or generics as well as D does would be a mistake, but presenting concurrency or generics as differentiating features of D is definitely a good thing to do.
Andrei
