On Tue, 24 Apr 2012, Eljay wrote:
> As a follow up to my email to Walter...
>
> I know I didn't address the question "How can D become adopted at my company?"
> head-on.
Your response is actually very typical of most responses to the question.
What's interesting to me is that it's really a deflection and dodges the
entire point of the question. By avoiding the question, you (and don't
take this personally, I mean 'the person answering a different question')
avoid committing to trying to find a way at all.
> An on-going project written in (say) C++ is not going to get approval to
> re-write in D. There is no ROI in it.
Neither Walter (in this case) nor the question asked for re-writting
anything. In fact, that's frequently stated (again, by Walter and others,
including myself) as explicitly a non-goal. Rewriting applications to
another language is an exercise in time wasting and bug-reintroduction.
Unless you have _another_ driving reason to do a rewrite, don't.
> A new project that could be written in D will be met with a lot of resistance.
> Management will consider D too risky, as compared to writing the same project
> in C++ or C# or Java. Co-workers not familiar with D will consider it as a
> pain-in-the-learning-curve [an attitude I cannot fathom; learning a new
> computer language is a joy, like opening a birthday present].
And this is finally getting a the heart of the question, but also
approaching it with an intend to fail approach to it. Of course you don't
want to take something new and introduce it as the solution for the next
huge risky project. That's bound to be smacked down and get no where. To
introduce change and reduce risk, you start small. Something that's safe
to let fail. Of course that can backfire too if you want it to:
"See, it failed, so the tools we used must suck." Except that
might not actually be why it failed.
So, the obvious follow up.. what have I done with D where I work? Little,
other than get it on the approved list of software we can use. It's not
on the list of officially supported languages (more a defacto thing than
an actual list). But the key problem is that I haven't written any new
code in a very long time, something I miss more and more. The
applications I do touch are all pre-existing code bases, so see above
about rewriting.
My 2 cents,
Brad
