On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 09:35:56 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
>>> I'm assuming that D is for general purpose programming as well.
>>
>> That seems to be where it is heading.  I don't think D stands a chance in that domain, but we'll see.
>
> With all due respect, on the contrary I think that promoting D as a general purpose programming language could be its only chance to really improve its popularity, and thus significantly grow its current user base.

Most programming languages are technically "general purpose", but when projects look for tooling they aren't looking for something generic, they are looking for a solution to a specific domain.

So, for a language to succeed you need to provide the best solution to something specific.

On Sat, 2017-06-24 at 10:34 +0000, Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars- d wrote:
> 
[…]
> Most programming languages are technically "general purpose", but when projects look for tooling they aren't looking for something generic, they are looking for a solution to a specific domain.
> 
> So, for a language to succeed you need to provide the best solution to something specific.

Just at the moment, for me, the reason to use D is it is the best language for GTK+3 and GStreamer. For this I am prepared to deal with the poor developer experience. For other tasks I'd use Go, Kotlin, Groovy, even Rust because they have far better tooling on Linux.

If Kotlin Native gets an equivalent to GtkD, with Kotlin style GTK+3 and GStreamer bindings as opposed to the C use currently supported, It is going to be a strong candidate for switching away from D to Kotlin.

-- 
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On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 10:34:07 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 09:35:56 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
>>>> I'm assuming that D is for general purpose programming as well.
>>>
>>> That seems to be where it is heading.  I don't think D stands a chance in that domain, but we'll see.
>>
>> With all due respect, on the contrary I think that promoting D as a general purpose programming language could be its only chance to really improve its popularity, and thus significantly grow its current user base.
>
> Most programming languages are technically "general purpose", but when projects look for tooling they aren't looking for something generic, they are looking for a solution to a specific domain.
>
> So, for a language to succeed you need to provide the best solution to something specific.

I agree, but it will be hard for D to beat C++, because people who *need* to use C++ as a "systems programming language" won't use D for the same reasons they don't use C#, Java or Go.

Just its GC keeps many C++ developers away from it, whether is justified or not, despite D is as low level and performant.

But a GC is rarely a problem for a scripter, because most scripting language already work this way.

So I think promoting D as a "systems programming language" won't help in improving its popularity, as its GC doesn't make it the best solution on this market.

On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 10:17:16 UTC, Wulfklaue wrote:
> On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 09:35:56 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
>> With all due respect, on the contrary I think that promoting D as a general purpose programming language could be its only chance to really improve its popularity, and thus significantly grow its current user base.
>>
>> I'm sorry to repeat myself once again on this forum, but it's obvious to me that D's strongest feature at the moment is that it has the best syntax on the market.
>
> I personally will not go that far. Syntax is more about preference. Rust looks dog ugly to me and yet some people find it beautiful.
>
> Personally i find Swift / Kotlin a nicer looking syntax then D.
>
>> Reference types, strings, maps, slices, arrays, UFCS, etc, everything is made so that the most obvious and readable code will work both safely and efficiently.
>>
>> There is absolutely zero syntactic noise, the code is crystal clear.
>>
>> So instead of losing many potential users by focusing on a niche market (unhappy C++ programmers), D should focus on its major strengths, which already now make it stand high above its competition.
>
> Agrees with that. The problem with a language trying to scope away a specific group of developers, from a existing ecosystem is that your fighting the entire ecosystem, not just the language. That is a mistake that many new languages make.
>
> Why switch over from C++ to D?
>
> Language => Sure.
> Tooling => No.
> Libraries => No.
> Editors => No.
> ...
>
> That has been the dilemma that not only D has faced. Until you get critical mass where people start writing a massive amount of your ecosystem, its hard to get people to switch over.
>
>> For instance, all these programmer-friendly features make D even more convenient for scripting than scripting languages themselves.
>
> True but the same can be said about Go. And Go is even more friendly and has the ecosystem now. You want to write something more exotic. There is big change that somebody wrote a module/package in Go. That is not going on with D. Sure, you can take a existing c library and transform it into D but it still takes work and is not always 100% idiomatic D.
>
> That is the main difference between D and lets say Kotlin. Kotlin build on top of Java and you can native imports all the libraries. There is less effort involved.
>
> Maybe this was mentioned before but a lot of programmers prefer to lazy program. They want to write there code, move forward with there project and not spend time on trying to get "things" to import/convert/work. D has more people who have no issue doing things the "hard" way. I applaud that resolve, i really do. But at the same time its a barrier, a attitude that makes it hard to accept those lazy people like me :)
>
>> IMHO, trying to compete directly with C++, C# and Java, with the current state of the language and of its ecosystem, is simply choosing the hardest path to success...
>
> See above. Some people prefer the hard way. The masochists *haha*. I know the angle where your coming from Ecstatic but its hard to convince people. Especially when there is a manpower shortage.
>
> Frankly, i think the best way to go about moving D to popularity, is simply money. More fully time programmers but that requires money.
>
> I do not understand why D does not have a BountySource account ( salt.bountysource.com ).
>
> Look at nim ( $1,896 last month ) /crystal ( $2,345 this month ):
>
> They publish there fund raising. They motivate people by pointing out the backers. Their income is a extra full time developer ( who wants to work for cheap :) ). The whole D foundation is nice and well but to me it feels like cloak and daggers. It something hiding in the background, something obscure. Maybe i am not expressing myself good again but D its fund raising seems to be largely corporate focused but they seem to lose a big market potential. Corporate funding is harder to get then a lot of small donations.
>
> Its just my two cents but if D wants to grow, it needs full time developers. Not just volunteer work. People who can do the grunt work that volunteers do not want to do ( because its just not sexy ).

I agree with all that you said.

Just about Go, I must say that language is a bit rude, and actually less convenient and versatile than D.

Many convenient features are missing (true reference classes, member function polymorphism, generics, etc).

IMHO, Go is lagging somewhere between C and D.

Kotlin is a better contender, especially with is LLVM implementation.

And with its current ecosystem, I'm sorry to say that indeed Kotlin native is becoming de factor the best alternative to D.

On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 10:21:50 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
> What on earth are you talking about[0]?
>
> [0] https://www.bountysource.com/teams/d

*wow* ... Call me amazed and dumbstruck.

I never considered that D has a bountysource account. Its way, waaaay at the bottom of the monthly listing page. It did not even show up until 3 days ago.

This is just ... /lost for words and that is a first.

There is like one contribution 3 days ago and the last activity is 8 months. No open contributions in the last 2+ years. *wow* ... just *wow* ...

Now i understand why some people complained that people if they wanted something, that they needed to pay for it. Expect people forgot to mention every time WHERE to put the payment. FFS ... i had people tell me several times pay for whatever feature and not a single person mention that D has a bountysource account.

Where is it even on the website????


Other sites:
============

Nim, one click on sponsors ( Top Page ) shows the sponsors and amounts or a big donate button ( bottom page ).

https://nim-lang.org/sponsors.html

Crystal, one click ( Top Page ) shows the sponsors and amounts.

https://crystal-lang.org/sponsors/

D, ... press Community, then press Donate. Already two clicks, hidden in the drop down menu.

https://dlang.org/donate.html

A big wall of text, no mention of donators, there amount. And then paypal but no bountysource...

Electronic wire transfer or bank check *bwahaaha*. What are we: 1980? Even worse, "Wire transfer information will be announced soon.". How long as that text been there??? Does the D team even look at there own website???


No offense but frankly, this is the equivalent of not having a bountysource account. Its simply hidden. There is no sponsors list, there is no motivation if people donate like "hey, my name is on the sponsor list". Or "hey, look, i am the top sponsor this month".

For your information, i am still on the Nim list ;)

----

I was under the impression that D with a bountysource account was going to be able to raise monthly funds on a higher level then Crystal and Nim. I really do not know what to say. No wonder when most new people do not even know its exists and the lack of acknowledgment on the website only reinforces this.

There is no focus on raising funds. I talked about D Foundation being obscure but this blow my mind. Talk about lost opportunities on the website and general marketing.

A community project that wants to grow but does not take its fundraising seriously... No no!!! Do not give me the party line: if you want it solved, then enhance the website. This is part of the core team there job. Its frankly the D Foundation there core job to ensure every left and right way money can be gained, so more people can be hired.

And sorry for the strong language but this is the truth! The fact that i as a newcomer needs to point this out is just ridiculous. Its easy to see why Nim and Crystal out fund D on bountysource.

On 24/06/2017 1:11 PM, Wulfklaue wrote:

snip

> And sorry for the strong language but this is the truth! The fact that i as a newcomer needs to point this out is just ridiculous. Its easy to see why Nim and Crystal out fund D on bountysource.

It's fine. You're not attacking anyone and not swearing for the sake of swearing :)

My recommendation is to fund specific people or donate directly to the D foundation. If there were people willing to fund specific people, it'll pick up in time. As it stands it is mostly behind closed doors and going straight to the people.

How to improve this without a giant wad of cash idk.

On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 12:11:29 UTC, Wulfklaue wrote:
> I never considered that D has a bountysource account. Its way, waaaay at the bottom of the monthly listing page. It did not even show up until 3 days ago.

It was somewhat active for a while a couple years ago, but I found it to be simply offensive and a demotivator. They (including a large corporation that you've heard of having gigabucks) attached $50 bounties to bugs that would take several days of work to fix... then, of course, you have to go though the review process which has an indeterminate wait and frequently shifts goalposts.

If any other client treated me like that, I'd walk away and never look back. (Heck, if any other client offered me what amounted to maybe $5 / hour, I'm not even sure that I'd waste my time actually telling them no - I might just ignore their emails as being a bad joke.)


Bountysource has changed since then, and now has the salt program, but I think I'm not the only one who found it counterproductive in its early iteration and finds the brand damaged. If we wanted to revive it, it'd have to be clearly done differently than it was before.



> Electronic wire transfer or bank check *bwahaaha*. What are we: 1980?

That's the way big donors actually prefer do business. Avoids having x% of their donation go to some for-profit middleman, and is easier accounting with the IRS. (D, being a legally incorporated not-for-profit organization, is required by US law to keep track of its financial information and publish an open report each year. Also, individuals and businesses donating to it can list that as a tax-deductible expense on their own annual returns - provided they have the necessary documentation.)


> There is no focus on raising funds. I talked about D Foundation being obscure but this blow my mind.

Perhaps we need a new director of development!

On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 11:18:10 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
> On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 10:34:07 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>> On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 09:35:56 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
>>>>> I'm assuming that D is for general purpose programming as well.
>>>>
>>>> That seems to be where it is heading.  I don't think D stands a chance in that domain, but we'll see.
>>>
>>> With all due respect, on the contrary I think that promoting D as a general purpose programming language could be its only chance to really improve its popularity, and thus significantly grow its current user base.

I know that in certain other sectors, people have high expectations of growth, but I really am at a loss to know what it is that people might expect significant growth to be when we already have some pretty impressive developments in the numbers that we do have.

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

Daily unique dmd downloads in Jan 2013 were 150-200 much of the time.  This year they have been between 1200 and 1700.  What kind of growth would it take for you to be satisfied - I am curious?  Bearing in mind that the availability of all three compilers via distributions has been improving over time.

And it seems to be unlikely to be a mere artefact of some sort because it lines up with what one observes in the forums, in what one hears about dconf lately versus prior years (I only went to the past couple) and more importantly in development activity - commercial and organic.

Weka.io hadn't even heard of D about three years ago and now they have one of the largest D projects there is.  3.5 years ago me neither - and soon I will be paying for about 4.5 full time equivalent people to work on D (maybe a bit more than that in time).  This little web company called eBay seems to be using it  - never heard of them before, but they seem pretty smart.  Remedy Games released Quantum Leap, which I guess sold millions of copies - it used D for scripting and they will be using D much more throughout the firm shortly.  It's used by a $20+bn hedge fund for their trading systems, and will gain greater adoption within a $3.5bn hedge fund quite soon.

https://dlang.org/orgs-using-d.html

And somebody else remarked to me: "just look at code.dlang.org these days - some interesting libraries and I don't know even half the names that wrote them".

D doesn't need to persuade most C++ users to switch over to succeed.  It doesn't need to persuade anyone you know to succeed.  It's at a stage where it's easy to keep growing without anything particularly dramatic happening.  All it needs to do is appeal just that little bit more to people who are already minded to use D, or for whom people who are in pain and looking for an answer (which D might be in part) to find out about the language - as happened recently with Weka.  And if I compare the documentation, libraries, and general quality of things today compared to 2014 when I started looking at the language, it's improving much faster than just a little bit every year.  One doesn't notice such change necessarily quickly.


> I agree, but it will be hard for D to beat C++, because people who *need* to use C++ as a "systems programming language" won't use D for the same reasons they don't use C#, Java or Go.

Finance is still one of the larger spenders as an industry.  C++ is used quite broadly within it for analytics.  Not because people want a system language and need to use malloc and free and freely drop down to assembly, but because there isn't an adequate alternative that's widely known about for now.  In 3-5 years time, I think number of users in finance of D will be higher, because it's the solution to pain.  Also, people tend to have end-users working in many different languages.  Writing separate clients for each one isn't ideal, and wrapping automatically makes much more sense.  SWIG works, after a fashion, but D offers some more pleasant and more maintainable alternatives.  R is done (thanks bachmeier); Python is done (PyD); Excel is done (me, Stefan + Atila); C/C++ is easy enough; C# will be done shortly, and I have already done some work on Java.  If you say that finance guys will never consider adopting D, I beg to differ because I think I know that world quite well.  And that's just a world I am familiar with, and there are plenty of others.

The web guys get the attention because they are doing interesting things, have particular challenges, and can afford to talk - because their edge doesn't mostly come from code, which is why they open-source so much of it.  It's a mistake to think that the people who talk are a good representation of the total number of lines of code that are written each year, let alone the total code that exists.  Visual Basic for Applications (Excel) programmers for example do not tend to get much attention - yet there's still a lot of code in VBA, a lot of new code being written each year.  And it's not an ideal language.  Spreadsheets themselves are a kind of functional code too.  And there are many other languages used from which D can pick up market share without anyone noticing.

Extended Pascal doesn't come up much.  But there's a 500k SLOC codebase used to design great big ships and I was speaking to a chap who spoke at dconf (Bastiaat) about his work on and use of Pegged, and there's a decent chance that will be ported to D.  It's D or Ada - I never hear anyone talk about D vs Pascal and D vs Ada.  But that would be a big and important project over time.

The truth of it as I see it is that the opinions of most technical people are first order irrelevant for the adoption of D, because even if they were fanatics about its adoption they simply are not in a position to make decisions.  So the people that matter are those who can make decisions, and of those it is principals that matter and not agents - people who have the authority to decide without having to consider primarily social factors, and not managers who are primarily responsible to other people and have to not just make the right decision, but justify it.  And in fact that's my understanding of how D was frequently  adopted in the firms where it is used.  Liran at Weka didn't do a bureaucratic study of the alternatives to justify his case to the board.  He knew his problem domain, and what was important, and when he heard about D from Kent Beck he recognised a solution, and he had earned the authority to decide because of his past accomplishments and it's difficult building a startup, but I doubt having to justify his language choices is one of the main things he worries about in life.  The Sociomantic founders didn't have to persuade anyone in the beginning, and I guess when they got bought Dunhumby didn't make their language choices a sticking point but were probably more happy to have found such talented people - if the purchase price is anything to go by.

When you have a small market share - and D's is not tiny, but it's not a top 10 language either, you don't need to achieve mass conversion to keep growing.  Just appeal to a slightly broader set of people, or have a higher appeal to those that already are sympathetic to the language - that's not something difficult to achieve once the ball is rolling.

These ideas are all fairly standard.  I don't completely agree with it, but Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm books etc get the idea across well.  And the idea is actually much older - it dates back to Toynbee's idea of creative minorities (new things come from the fringes), to the ideas about Ibn Khaldun (the founder of economics, one might say) about civilisational renewal, and the same insight is in Ecclesiastes in the Bible (if you think it through carefully).

> Just its GC keeps many C++ developers away from it, whether is justified or not, despite D is as low level and performant.

Yes - but read the Reddit comments this year.  There's a subtle change in tone that's quite important.  Over the years people have developed a standard set of excuses not to explore the language - as Andrei observes, people develop these as a defence in the face of a rapid rate of change.  If one looked into everything, there'd be no time to do any work at all.

These standard sales objections are receding because they simply don't hold water at all, or not nearly so.  There are no jobs in D - well, if you are good I'm always open to working with the right sort of people; and I was at DConf on a large table of people all working for a living with D, and it was a funny line because there are jobs in D, and for some people it's been pretty good career-wise.  The blog posts on the GC have been very good at getting people to think more carefully about this blanket dismissal too.  (And I guess when we have ref-counted exceptions and much more of Phobos is truly no-gc that will help too).  By the way, the fact that people are committing their energy to work on blog posts and so on tells you something about the increasing commitment of energy from the community.

There's a C++ guy I work with now, and I was wondering what his response might be to suggesting we consider using D in the part of the business he is involved in.  He wasn't particularly concerned about the GC, but I showed him that it didn't matter for what we do, and that in any case you can avoid using it for much and keep the heap small.  That wasn't the obstacle.  Main thing is just needing to change our build process, which isn't hard but will take a little bit of time.  He didn't need persuading - he could just recognise it as leading to more readable, more componentised code and it  also - with a bit more investment upfront - solves our wrapping problem.

People have very different contexts, and it's worth bearing that in mind when one reads forum comments too.  Somebody who earns a living teaching people popular languages but has invested lots of time in D and hasn't found it paid off commercially - yes, of course that will shape their attitude towards D from here.  But that hasn't got to do much with the prospects for the further development of the language, which isn't to say one can't learn from them about what to improve.  Another guy who loves talking about languages in a very theoretical way - but there's some debate about whether he has written anything serious in D at all.  Well everyone is welcome to an opinion, but probably some perspectives may be a better guide to the likelihood of broader adoption than others.  Walter himself -
 a man who not just survived but flourished in a very competitive field operating as a leanly-staffed underdog - has remarked that in his experience non-customers would tell you all kinds of things, but when you satisfied what they wanted it never actually lead to a change.  What works is paying attention to people who are already customers, or at least using your product in some way seriously.

And enterprise users generally don't have time to post much in forums because they have work to do - how often do you see people from Weka and Sociomantic post here in relation to the number of people they have?

The above about listening to your real users could be seen as self-serving, but I don't mean it in that way - I find the leadership perfectly responsive as a commercial user (and I don't really need much).  Rather it's just to observe there's a lot of "what D really needs is this", but I'm not sure these perspectives are always a good guide to what will help.

Wulfklaue:
"Agrees with that. The problem with a language trying to scope away a specific group of developers, from a existing ecosystem is that your fighting the entire ecosystem, not just the language. That is a mistake that many new languages make."

Nobody in their right minds would try to target an abstractly-defined category of developers.  The world doesn't work that way, and it's not what anyone is doing.  People are drawn to things that offer them something better, and what's better very much depends in the situation you are in, and what your constraints are - and situations that might appear identical from the outside really aren't from the inside because these things are shaped by culture, history, perceptions and emotional factors within the group, not to mention different basic conditions (industry and firm challenges, the kinds of people you have already), and so on.

"Maybe this was mentioned before but a lot of programmers prefer to lazy program. They want to write there code, move forward with there project and not spend time on trying to get "things" to import/convert/work. D has more people who have no issue doing things the "hard" way. I applaud that resolve, i really do. But at the same time its a barrier, a attitude that makes it hard to accept those lazy people like me :)"

I don't know if D is a language for everybody.  I agree that D has people who don't mind a bit of discomfort and doing things the hard way.  I wouldn't be here if it were any different.  I agree that it's a barrier, but complex living things can't grow without a barrier, membrane or border.  I live in Barnes, and it's in London, only 40 minutes to Mayfair, but like a little English village.  And the reason for that is there is no tube and it's a bit difficult to get here.  If there were a tube station its character would be very different.  And that's true of all social groups - if there is no price to be paid for admission, implicit or not, then the group won't develop a character of its own.  So I see the features of D that concern you as a positive - it's a nice filter to be able to find the people that I would like to work with.  My industry is a tough and demanding industry and the people who do best in it are those who are resourceful and able to figure things out for themselves when needed.  It's not difficult to find excellent D programmers - one has to go through many more candidates to find excellent C# programmers that are aware of developments beyond the MS micro-culture.

A chap called Nassim Taleb talks about some of these ideas in his work on hormesis and antifragility.  The D community creates hormesis and this is a healthy filter.  And not being as dependent on pretty labour-saving tools (and not needing them) has some positive effects too.  Taleb talks about seeing a businessman in the lobby, giving his bags to a porter to take up to his room.  Twenty minutes later he sees him in the gym lifting weights.  And his point is that taking advantage of natural organic challenges to build fitness can build much more strength than synthetic approaches to try to replace what we have lost.  I've personally benefited from having to figure many more things out for myself than I would have needed to had I stuck with Python or learnt C#.  The extra time invested wasn't significant compared to the payoff even so far, but building a capability is a gift that keeps on giving.

I wanted to contribute a small token amount to BountySource as I thought I should.  You mention crystal at $2.3k/month.  Well I've contributed much more than that personally per month on average in the time I have been involved in the community for things that I have open-sourced.  Not the same thing as bounties, but for example the work we did on dub came out of my own pocket.  And I'm sure Weka's investment to date dwarfs my modest contribution, and we have all benefited from it.  In other words this language community works differently - I think commercial users would often rather approach someone directly than post a bounty.

And as Adam says, the kind of people that work on D aren't necessarily motivated by money to do such work.  Studies suggest that when you pay someone to do something it often takes the joy out of it by turning motivation from autotelic to instrumental.  So it's not clear that it's even healthy for the community.  Pragmatically, maybe it's one solution to get people to work on tedious but important things - but I really wouldn't consider it likely to be the main driver of developments for a community such as the one we have.

It's happened to me by the way that I've asked somebody who contributes a lot to the community if he would be interested in helping me for a fee, and he really wasn't.  And that's sometimes because people are very good programmers, and for some that can lead to pretty good career or business success and they contribute to D because they like it.  It's a fortunate position for such a community to have such people working on the language or ecosystem that couldn't be paid by a company to do the same because their price is too high - provided any one person isn't ultra critical.

"The whole D foundation is nice and well but to me it feels like cloak and daggers. It something hiding in the background, something obscure. Maybe i am not expressing myself good again but D its fund raising seems to be largely corporate focused but they seem to lose a big market potential. Corporate funding is harder to get then a lot of small donations."

Give it a chance - it's barely got off the ground yet.  Best way to get a foundation to listen to you is to give them a little bit of money if you can afford it, or do something helpful for them if you have time and some talent but not money to spare.  I think corporate funding is easier to get than lots of small donations, because not all corporates are vast enterprises - it's by far easier to persuade entrepreneurial people who want to support something anyway then a legion of smaller supporters.  Nonetheless the language needs both.  Do you contribute yet?

" Syntax is more about preference."

If you look at the reactions of people around the world, beauty isn't something utterly idiosyncratically subjective - tastes vary, but less than some would say.  And tastes may differ about language design (some might say part of that is that some people have better taste than others, but let's not discuss that for now) too.  But in my experience idiomatic D code is very readable and clear, and if you compare it say to Boost or quite a lot of Python code that isn't always the case.  And readability and clarity and ability to express intent matter a lot because code is read much more than it is written and code lives a long time.  So it's not simply a question of preference - it's much more important than that.

"Electronic wire transfer or bank check *bwahaaha*. What are we: 1980? Even worse, "Wire transfer information will be announced soon.". How long as that text been there??? Does the D team even look at there own website???"

I paid via PayPal.  It was easy.  If you have a suggestion for improving, I am sure people would welcome a pull request.  If you're not willing to do the work, then that's quite reasonable, but it's less reasonable to insist on others doing it...

"I was under the impression that D with a bountysource account was going to be able to raise monthly funds on a higher level then Crystal and Nim. I really do not know what to say. No wonder when most new people do not even know its exists and the lack of acknowledgment on the website only reinforces this."

$24k a year is a completely trivial amount that means nothing in the scheme of things, and it's a mistake to be distracted by such noise.

"There is no focus on raising funds."
Raising more substantial amounts of money works very differently from raising the sorts of sums you discuss.  It makes sense given where D starts, the people involved, and the fact that it's quite a lean team, to start with more substantial amounts because the return on time and attention is much higher (and it's working in a domain that's easier to understand).

"Its easy to see why Nim and Crystal out fund D on bountysource."

If you have commercial users who have been using your language at a reasonable scale in production (Weka manage 100s of Petabytes using D, I think, and most people know the scale of Sociomantic's use too) then your approach is going to be different from languages that are newer and with less commercial adoption.  Your strategy depends on where you are, but that's something that may not be obvious to a newcomer or someone who hasn't had to think about how to raise money.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14431315
Xored, and who else?
https://dlang.org/orgs-using-d.html
There are others not listed here even




Of course it's always interesting to hear ideas for improvement.



Laeeth

On Saturday, 24 June 2017 at 17:43:36 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> R is done (thanks bachmeier)

Integration with R is largely complete, but the missing piece has always been lack of Windows support, which meant it wasn't an option for most users.

Just this morning I got things working on Windows. Now that all three major platforms have support, it is as reasonable to create an R package with D functions as C, C++ or Fortran. Anyone can write up a library of D functions and put a package on Bitbucket or Github. The R user doesn't even need to know which language the functions are written in.

This could possibly lead to wider adoption of D. Right now Rcpp is the most popular dependency for R packages (over 1000 at last check). And that's only a tiny fraction of overall Rcpp usage; many users write their own C++ code but don't upload a package to CRAN. It is my belief that these statisticians and econometricians and biologists - few of whom have a C++ background or know what a GC is - are open to a language like D. I plan to write a post on my website demonstrating usage soon.

On my agenda next are interoperability with Julia and Octave (which isn't that popular, but would make a lot of Matlab code available inside D). I honestly don't know if this will bring in new D users, but for the most part I don't care, because I'm doing it for my own research. Nonetheless, I think the potential to expand the D userbase is there.

On 6/24/17 1:11 PM, Wulfklaue wrote:
[snip]

Thanks, this is a good point. The bountysource has been tried by
Facebook (with D and other projects) and was deemed unsuccessful. It may
be the time for trying a new angle on bountysource though.

We'll look into defining a page listing existing sponsors (though the
majority by monies are anonymous) and a simple method to donate on the
website.

> Electronic wire transfer or bank check *bwahaaha*. What are we: 1980?

What other methods of payments do you have in mind?

> Even worse, "Wire transfer information will be announced soon.". How
> long as that text been there???

That's not much to worry about - we did have a few wire transfers; it's not like people who want to wire us money have difficulty reaching us for details. Nevertheless we need to update that.


Thanks,

Andrei