On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 15:09:53 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>
> This is engineering, not fucking fashion. Popularity has no place in decision making here. From everything I've seen, 90% of the problems that exist in computing technology today can be traced back directly to some jackass(es) weighing popularity higher than actual technical merit.

Companies use whatever the money-making competition use, and often bias their evaluations to favor doing things in the same way.

Look at all these stories about Twitter/Facebook/WebStartup technology stack. They wouldn't be anything interesting if they weren't famous.

But they are visible and make money, so what they use must be the right thing.

On 09/29/2015 10:51 AM, ponce wrote:
> On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 15:09:53 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>
>> This is engineering, not fucking fashion. Popularity has no place in
>> decision making here. From everything I've seen, 90% of the problems
>> that exist in computing technology today can be traced back directly
>> to some jackass(es) weighing popularity higher than actual technical
>> merit.
>
> Companies use whatever the money-making competition use, and often bias
> their evaluations to favor doing things in the same way.
>
> Look at all these stories about Twitter/Facebook/WebStartup technology
> stack. They wouldn't be anything interesting if they weren't famous.
>
> But they are visible and make money, so what they use must be the right
> thing.

Yea. I just wish more people understood the fallacy of that (and all the other basic, basic fallacies out there). :(

This one is basically what I've seen described as the "Birdmen fallacy":
https://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/the-birdmen-dont-fly/

See birds fly. Blindly imitate the feathers, not the physics. Fail. Blame anything but the "imitate feathers" approach. Repeat.

On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 12:19:48 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> Having just done a session at PyConUK 2015 aimed at weaning people of
> pure Python and into polyglot – Python with (C++|D|Chapel) (there
> should have been a Rust bit but…) – and as people probably heard the D
> bit was a bit embarrassing for me, I got some interesting comments
> during the rest of the conference.
>
> 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."
>
> This would seem to indicate that D really does need to have a marketing campaign to show it does have traction and isn't just a little ghetto as so many languages end up in. D's forays into AAA games, finance, etc. all need to get permanent presence. In this respect, Reddit is (almost) an irrelevance: bulk perception is unaffected by Reddit, most programmers do not even look at it, let alone follow it. It would be nice if Tiobe and the like were an irrelevance, but that is less so.
>
> Having active regional groups is a first important factor, and that is happening, though perhaps less than would be good. Having lots of projects on GitHub (and BitBucket) that get noticed. Clearly everyone is fighting JavaScript, but that is not an issue for D per se. Go, Rust, C++, C are the "enemy".
>
> Maybe discuss this a bit at the coming London D Meeting – which sadly clashes with the London Go Meeting…


Honestly, the biggest thing that would get some D traction is people writing developer tools in it.  I've been working on some release tooling in D to snapshot sets of repositories for later checkout and to generate changelogs from commit messages somewhat like dpkg-dch.

-Shammah