On 09/23/2015 11:29 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>
> While there is truth to this, it's also true that people's time is
> valuable, and many programmers are not going to want to spend time
> learning a language that they're not going to be able to use in the long
> run. And even if it can be used in the long run, if they're not going to
> be able to use it in a job, then maybe their time is better spent
> learning a language which they _will_ be able to use in their job - or
> even help them get a job if they know it.

Well, even then, there's still *somebody* making decisions with popularity over merit, even when (or *especially* when) it's a manager instead of a developer.

And I am speaking about the general decision making process here, not just specifically about the choice to "use/learn D" or "not use/learn D".

On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 15:47:06 UTC, Chris wrote:
> We're up against
>
> a) billions of dollars:
>    big corporations (cf. Go) and the Java/C++/C# industry that makes millions selling training courses and books etc.
> b) the general inertia and herd behavior of people, and to make the herd move you need a)

This said, there's also

c) the D community, which is sometimes its own worst enemy

On 09/23/2015 11:45 AM, John Colvin wrote:
>
> I think you're misinterpreting some of these people. Some will be
> following fashions, but many will be simply not wanting to put time and
> effort in to something that they're not convinced is going to work out
> in the long run.

That amounts to the same thing, just indirectly: It's a myopic approach that involves a failure to understand the basic dynamics of plain old self-fulfilling prophecies:

"Things succeed/fail BECAUSE people LIKE ME use it or pass on it. Therefore, we should make that choice based on whether it's WORTHY. Because if instead, we base it on whether we think OTHER people will/won't use it (ESPECIALLY if THOSE people are ALSO going to be choosing based on the same 'what is everyone else going to pick?' crystal ball), then we're all chasing each other's tails and the result boils down to randomness (at best) or more likely, becomes predominantly influenced by superficial factors and biased parties."

It's a very, very basic line of logic, especially for people in a profession that's so fundamentally rooted in exactly such logical reasoning.

On 09/23/2015 11:47 AM, Chris wrote:
>
> a) billions of dollars:
>     big corporations (cf. Go) and the Java/C++/C# industry that makes
> millions selling training courses and books etc.
> b) the general inertia and herd behavior of people, and to make the herd
> move you need a)
>

FWIW, Python hit pretty big success with a different approach: Appeal to people's innate desire for instant gratification. By the time they discover the downsides, they're already knee-deep. (Obviously I'm not suggesting this was intentional, just seems to be the way it played out.)

I'm not making any suggestions or drawing conclusions from that, I just think it's relevant and worth being aware of.

On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 15:47:06 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 12:19:48 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
>
>> The most important can be paraphrased as "I had heard of D but as it was getting no traction, I never looked at it again."
>
> Sad but true. Developers want better tools, but don't even look at them, unless you hype them. No wonder mediocre but well-hyped languages could be so successful. The sad thing is that one would have thought that developers are a bit wiser than the average consumer when it comes to choosing their tools.

Most developers are either not interested in choosing their own tools, or know they're not smart enough to do so.  Instead, they rely on the same mechanism as most consumers, social proof, ie do what everybody else in your field is doing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof

D is still in the innovators and early adopters stage of the tech adoption lifecycle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle

To break out to an early majority, D will have to prove itself, ie the innovators and early adopters have to show empirically that it is working better for them and allowing them to do more.  Sociomantic would be a good success story to point at, though the fact they're still on D1 hurts that story.

This is why I keep saying D needs a killer app to break out and garner attention so it spreads wider.  An example would be how the success of Whatsapp brought more attention to Erlang.  Barring that, a bunch of nice libraries on dub that get attention might work too.  One is a home run, the other is a bunch of singles, to use a baseball analogy.

I'm hoping that once D is on mobile, it will prove fertile terrain and flourish there.  I think more could be done to publicize it as a good language on the server, that scales well and is much easier to develop with.

There will need to be a paid toolchain at some point, to spur more development and more manpower on sanding down the rough edges of the tools.  That's a chicken-and-egg situation right now, as there might not be enough devs and businesses making money off D to pay for such tools yet.

On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 16:22:02 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> FWIW, Python hit pretty big success with a different approach: Appeal to people's innate desire for instant gratification.

Perl and Python gained traction because they replaced multiple other scripting tools by a single one. What is D replacing?

Adoption of Python2 has taken a long time, it is _very_ stable, cross platform and has 60000 libraries... Python3, C11 and Perl6 might end up never being widely adopted, and instead be superseded by a completely different language.

(You can compare Python2/C99 with D1 and Python3/C11 with D2.)

On 09/23/2015 01:16 PM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 16:22:02 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> FWIW, Python hit pretty big success with a different approach: Appeal
>> to people's innate desire for instant gratification.
>
> Perl and Python gained traction because they replaced multiple other
> scripting tools by a single one. What is D replacing?

C/C++ (and Python) as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, marketing it that way isn't so PC anymore ;)  But hell, that's what drew me.

>
> (You can compare Python2/C99 with D1 and Python3/C11 with D2.)
>

Except D2's already surpassed D1 :)

On 09/23/2015 12:22 PM, Joakim wrote:
>
> Most developers are either not interested in choosing their own tools,
> or know they're not smart enough to do so.

Perhaps so. Although if they're in either of those boats, then IMO they're unqualified to be doing it professionally, at least beyond intern-level anyway.

> Instead, they rely on the
> same mechanism as most consumers, social proof, ie do what everybody
> else in your field is doing:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof
>
> D is still in the innovators and early adopters stage of the tech
> adoption lifecycle:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle
>
> To break out to an early majority, D will have to prove itself, ie the
> innovators and early adopters have to show empirically that it is
> working better for them and allowing them to do more. Sociomantic would
> be a good success story to point at, though the fact they're still on D1
> hurts that story.
>
> This is why I keep saying D needs a killer app to break out and garner
> attention so it spreads wider.  An example would be how the success of
> Whatsapp brought more attention to Erlang. Barring that, a bunch of nice
> libraries on dub that get attention might work too.  One is a home run,
> the other is a bunch of singles, to use a baseball analogy.
>

Yea, I do agree. Although, I think we already have that with vibe.d, but that still doesn't stop the excuses-mill. :/

> I'm hoping that once D is on mobile, it will prove fertile terrain and
> flourish there.  I think more could be done to publicize it as a good
> language on the server, that scales well and is much easier to develop
> with.
>

That'd be nice.

> There will need to be a paid toolchain at some point, to spur more
> development and more manpower on sanding down the rough edges of the
> tools.  That's a chicken-and-egg situation right now, as there might not
> be enough devs and businesses making money off D to pay for such tools yet.

Yea.

On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 18:33:06 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> C/C++ (and Python) as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, marketing it that way isn't so PC anymore ;)  But hell, that's what drew me.

C/C++ for me too, but that was to a large extent due to D1's simplicity (easy to learn, readable source code compared to C/C++).

> Except D2's already surpassed D1 :)

That's true, although D1 had a more active library producing community?

On 09/23/2015 02:57 PM, Ola Fosheim Grostad wrote:
> On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 18:33:06 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Except D2's already surpassed D1 :)
>
> That's true, although D1 had a more active library producing community?

Hmm, that's not the impression I get (aside from Tango which was a pretty large effort).

D1 had a lot of little libs that briefly blipped and got abandoned. D2 has code.dlang.org and github, and maybe(?) a few fewer libs overall, but what libs it does have tend to be more stable/mature. Almost like D2 was kind of a shake-out, filtering out less serious/mature projects and giving the others a better foundation to grow on.

Of course, the rapid pace of language development around the D1 days made it harder for libs to be well-maintained anyway, compared to now.