http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png

Bad data, one off spike, or something else?

On 12/23/2017 1:04 PM, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png
> 
> Bad data, one off spike, or something else?

Wow!

On Sat, Dec 23, 2017 at 09:04:52PM +0000, Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png
> 
> Bad data, one off spike, or something else?

D is finally catching on? :-D  (So I hope. :-P)


T

-- 
Food and laptops don't mix.

On Saturday, 23 December 2017 at 21:04:52 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png
>
> Bad data, one off spike, or something else?

OOps, hadn't seen this thread. Sorry.

On Saturday, 23 December 2017 at 21:04:52 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png
>
> Bad data, one off spike, or something else?

Perdon my skepticism, but there is a higher chance that a new web crawler is downloading DMD multiple times - that isn't filtered out by the script - rather than users being suddenly three times as many.

On Sunday, 24 December 2017 at 12:25:49 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> On Saturday, 23 December 2017 at 21:04:52 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>> http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png
>>
>> Bad data, one off spike, or something else?
>
> Perdon my skepticism, but there is a higher chance that a new web crawler is downloading DMD multiple times - that isn't filtered out by the script - rather than users being suddenly three times as many.

We don't know until we study the data (which should be simple to do if someone is curious and has access to it).  Social phenomena are very strange, much stranger than economists and other students of social data recognise.  I looked at that chart recently, and thought explosive.  I didn't expect to see that kind of spike.  (It's supposed to be a 28-day moving average - is that right?)  In a market that spikes due to noise trades it's not that uncommon for it to head there for real a little while later in a less ephemeral way...  Maybe non-traded social phenomena are completely different, but they might be more similar to market phenomena than people think.  So, yes, the spike is probably in part noise but look at the broader context.  People are not very good at understanding at a deep level the implications of compound growth, sustained over time.

I didn't get involved with D because I thought it would become popular, but I've been saying since 2014 that language advocates are pushing at an open door because external conditions are changing in the direction where what D offers becomes more useful to a wider audience. William Gibson had a character observe that the future is already here, just unevenly distributed.  And I think that's the case with adoption of D (the problems that early adopters face, and that recognise they face, for which D is a good and practical answer for them will become more prevalent over time).

Digicash was launched in 1989.  The cypherpunks list began in 1992.  I remember reading a message by Tim May a few months after the list began setting out the reasons why cryptocurrency would succeed, and he was obviously right.  But it took a very long time for it to gain traction.  (The first person to receive Bitcoin was Hal Finney, a prominent member of both the extropians and cypherpunks lists).  One could have reasonably said for many years 'cryptocurrency hasn't taken off, so it won't'.  But that's not how social phenomena develop.  They build slowly in the beginning, and there are certain thresholds of perception that need to be surpassed for a broader audience to start to get it.  And things only break out into the world when external conditions are ripe - but those earlier years are very important for the thing to reach a level of maturity and refinement that simply could not have been possible had popularity been achieved earlier.

It's not true that there are no jobs in D - we are hiring at least four people (depending on the people likely to be working at least partly in D), as are others - but maybe it was important for the development of the language that in the beginning there weren't jobs.  Because the only people that were involved were those that were intrinsically motivated, and that's important to get to technical excellence...


Laeeth.

On 12/24/2017 7:33 AM, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>(The first person to receive 
> Bitcoin was Hal Finney, a prominent member of both the extropians and cypherpunks lists).
Hal was in the dorm room next to mine when I was a freshman. He was one of the smartest people I've ever known, by a wide margin. Also one of the nicest.

I've always suspected Hal of being Satoshi :-) A grand joke like that is something he'd do.

On Saturday, 23 December 2017 at 21:04:52 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png
>
> Bad data, one off spike, or something else?


https://successfulsoftware.net/2015/05/14/the-mystery-of-the-chinese-downloads/

On Thursday, 28 December 2017 at 22:02:16 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/24/2017 7:33 AM, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>>(The first person to receive
>> Bitcoin was Hal Finney, a prominent member of both the extropians and cypherpunks lists).
> Hal was in the dorm room next to mine when I was a freshman. He was one of the smartest people I've ever known, by a wide margin. Also one of the nicest.
>
> I've always suspected Hal of being Satoshi :-) A grand joke like that is something he'd do.

Some people reasonably well placed to have an idea think he was part of the group mind that Satoshi became...

I dug out the archives recently for both mailing lists.  Amazing the high level of discussion back then, and how those fringe ideas became mainstream.  It took a while though!

On Saturday, 30 December 2017 at 00:14:45 UTC, codephantom wrote:
> On Saturday, 23 December 2017 at 21:04:52 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>> http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png
>>
>> Bad data, one off spike, or something else?
>
>
> https://successfulsoftware.net/2015/05/14/the-mystery-of-the-chinese-downloads/

Maybe we should produce two charts, one filtering out Chinese IPs