On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 02:30:42 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 14, 2013 22:56:30 Andre Artus wrote:
>> As with many things it depends on what you want to achieve.
>> Answering on SO is as much about establishing awareness as it is
>> about answering the question. For a newcomer to D StackOverflow
>> may be their first port of call, if questions go unanswered, or
>> are answered after long delays, then the likelihood of the person
>> persisting with D is diminished.
>
> I answer questions on SO all the time, but I rarely ask anything there, and I
> never ask anything D-related there. Of course, if my question is D-related,
> I'm much more likely to _have_ to ask my question here to get a good answer
> anyway just based on how many people would even know the answer, simply
> because I know enough that anything I asked would be much more likely to be
> esoteric and/or require in-depth knowledge. The experts are all here, and only
> a small portion of them are on SO.
>
> In any case, I'd say that in general, asking your question on SO gives it more
> visibility to those outside of the core D community, but you're more likely to
> get a good answer here than there, because there are more people here, and
> this is where the experts are.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

I agree with every point you've made here. If I had a D related question I would not head for SO first. I have found a lot in the D forums without actually having to ask the questions myself. But it does not do much for D's exposure.

Evangelizing takes planning and effort. Technical merit is unfortunately insufficient to guarantee success in the marketplace of ideas. I have known about D for quite some time, but did not put too much effort into it until recently. It's when I stumbled across the DConf2013 videos that I realized that there is some serious legs under D. The quality of the presentations (in terms of content over glitz) exceeded that of many similar conferences I've seen.

Languages like Ruby, Python, PHP, R, etc. do not have the buzz they do because of inherent technical merit, but perhaps in spite of thereof. Each has some killer framework compelling you to adopt the language in order to benefit from it, and people putting serious effort into evangelizing and lowering the barriers.

I see there is a thread going on creating D GUI framework, I think that would be a major step towards lowering the barriers. It needs to be part of a "batteries included" set-up for D. So you can download D and run your Hello World GUI app in under 10 minutes. Not spend half the day searching for mostly abandoned efforts and then spending the rest of the day compiling the C/C++ dependencies only later to find that you have been sucked into the 7th layer of Dependency Hell. While modern C++ has become a lot less unpleasant it is still unpleasant; someone new to D should never have to run a C/C++ compiler for any reason other than to compare compilation time (with a big fat grin on their dial for choosing D).

On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 02:30:42 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 14, 2013 22:56:30 Andre Artus wrote:
>> As with many things it depends on what you want to achieve.
>> Answering on SO is as much about establishing awareness as it is
>> about answering the question. For a newcomer to D StackOverflow
>> may be their first port of call, if questions go unanswered, or
>> are answered after long delays, then the likelihood of the person
>> persisting with D is diminished.
>
> I answer questions on SO all the time

And I have to thank you for that.  You leave some great, in-depth
answers on Stack Overflow.

On Wed, 14 Aug 2013 22:56:30 +0200
"Andre Artus" <andre.artus@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> A relatively small number of people are attracted to tools and languages that don't have broad exposure. These people are marked by dogged determinism and a high tolerance for [mental] pain. Your average Joe or Jane is not like that, they have something they want to achieve and if they perceive the language/tools are working against them they will try something else.
> 

FWIW, I'm sold on D specifically *because* I have very little patience for tools that feel like they're working against me.

On 8/14/2013 10:05 PM, Brad Anderson wrote:
> On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 02:30:42 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
> wrote:
>> On Wednesday, August 14, 2013 22:56:30 Andre Artus wrote:
>>> As with many things it depends on what you want to achieve.
>>> Answering on SO is as much about establishing awareness as it is
>>> about answering the question. For a newcomer to D StackOverflow
>>> may be their first port of call, if questions go unanswered, or
>>> are answered after long delays, then the likelihood of the person
>>> persisting with D is diminished.
>>
>> I answer questions on SO all the time
>
> And I have to thank you for that.  You leave some great, in-depth
> answers on Stack Overflow.

I'll chime in thanking Jonathan for this valuable contribution.

On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 05:06:48 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Aug 2013 22:56:30 +0200
> "Andre Artus" <andre.artus@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> A relatively small number of people are attracted to tools and languages that don't have broad exposure. These people are marked by dogged determinism and a high tolerance for [mental] pain. Your average Joe or Jane is not like that, they have something they want to achieve and if they perceive the language/tools are working against them they will try something else.
>> 
>
> FWIW, I'm sold on D specifically *because* I have very little patience
> for tools that feel like they're working against me.

Totally with Nick on this one. I liked C/C++ specifically because of the generic programming aspect + static typing. Then I learned that D did it better. Then I switched for my personal projects (all recently).

== A self-case-study regarding SO

The conversion started after I read this post on SO:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/3560395/1467466

That... was shocking in simplicity. Shocking enough for me to play the what if game for a few minutes. It meant that someone could move a lot of functionality and hackery that build tools perform into the language and make it 'purdy. I *like* my code, including build tool, looking 'purdy. Or even 'purrrrrdy.

Looking at it now, that demo is a code snippet. It demos *the code* and the constructs and how pretty it looks. The bullet point answer above it, the accepted one, didn't catch my eyes. It was just a list of features. I mean, yeah, CTFE was exciting, but the code snippet demonstrating how succinct it all was... THAT WAS EYE CATCHING.

IT. WAS. 'PURDY.

D's flippin' awesome, I can implement functionality like C++'s 'bind' function in 40 lines while the Boost library has to do in hundreds of lines (for compatibility, BUT STILL), I can deal with arbitrary tuples in a sane way, mixin arbitrary strings, I'm not constantly reaching down with my pointer finger to the less-than sign while my left hand is occupied with shift or scrunching my right pinky against the shift while my right middle is trying to hit the greater-than sign... D is just -pleasant-.

I'm enjoying all of this now *because* I was tipped off on D's awesomeness... by StackOverflow.

On the flip-side, here's 'nother tidbit (I saw this crazy thing before the post above):

http://stackoverflow.com/a/7303196/1467466

Yeah, sure, it's impressive, but there's no code snippet. There's no demo of how the code was *written*. C++ also has Turing-complete metaprogramming, whoopdeedoo. My only experience at that point with metaprogramming had been torturous for anything more than a little complicated; what else could I have expected of this clearly masochistic individual's code? "Nothing new here, moving along..." was my thinking there. The post above it had snippets, but was kind of long and I didn't feel like diving too deep when I didn't yet care much for the language.

== The long and short of it:

I'm only one data point, but I'm still a data point. :-P

I understand that, really, er'rything should be for knowledge's sake, but, if it isn't too much effort, please answer Qs while strutting D's prettiness on SO.

Massive, massive kudos to whoever's had the patience to answer newbie questions, as unclear as they may have been sometimes (such as my own).

== And the obligatory...

HI FIRST TIME POSTING. Just yell at me if I get too obnoxious and whatnot.

On 8/14/2013 11:17 PM, Atash wrote:
> HI FIRST TIME POSTING. Just yell at me if I get too obnoxious and whatnot.

I enjoyed your post. Welcome! and post more.

On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 06:11:32 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/14/2013 10:05 PM, Brad Anderson wrote:
>> On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 02:30:42 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
>> wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, August 14, 2013 22:56:30 Andre Artus wrote:
>>>> As with many things it depends on what you want to achieve.
>>>> Answering on SO is as much about establishing awareness as it is
>>>> about answering the question. For a newcomer to D StackOverflow
>>>> may be their first port of call, if questions go unanswered, or
>>>> are answered after long delays, then the likelihood of the person
>>>> persisting with D is diminished.
>>>
>>> I answer questions on SO all the time
>>
>> And I have to thank you for that.  You leave some great, in-depth
>> answers on Stack Overflow.
>
> I'll chime in thanking Jonathan for this valuable contribution.

I think I'll chip in by answering questions on SO too. I enjoy helping.

On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 17:55:38 UTC, monarch_dodra wrote:
>> I'll chime in thanking Jonathan for this valuable contribution.
>
> I think I'll chip in by answering questions on SO too. I enjoy helping.

Be warned - by the time notification about new question arrives in RSS feed, it usually already has long and comprehensive answer from Jonathan :)

On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 00:23:16 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> You can define a filter that emails you whenever there are new questions on the "D" tag.

Why not set up D.learn (or a new mailing list) to track that filter? That should help prompt the community here to engage with any new questions.

On 8/15/13 5:07 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 00:23:16 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> You can define a filter that emails you whenever there are new
>> questions on the "D" tag.
>
> Why not set up D.learn (or a new mailing list) to track that filter?
> That should help prompt the community here to engage with any new
> questions.

cc Vladimir Panteleev

Terrific idea.


Andrei