March 17, 2018 Re: D beyond the specs | ||||
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Posted in reply to Aurélien Plazzotta | On Friday, 16 March 2018 at 18:38:44 UTC, Aurélien Plazzotta wrote:
> Also, french citizens don't like taking financial and technological risks, now adopting D for professionnal use is a big one.
A friend of mine has heard about D for about ten years. I've been bothering people for a while.
At last dinner we realized two among the table were full-time D programmers, and this friend's own brother works with Laeeth. So now he now has 3 acquaintances that use D professionally, and are enthusiastic.
I don't think such a meal is common in France, just a data point.
Only then he _started asking questions_ about D and what you could do, etc.
While France is all about status (titles, living well over your means), and people prefer to learn "high-status" languages, I guess this is the profile of late adopters everywhere.
Germany is hopefully different, it takes only one german to change a light bulb :)
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March 17, 2018 Re: D beyond the specs | ||||
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Posted in reply to Arjan | On 3/17/2018 4:28 AM, Arjan wrote:
> On Friday, 16 March 2018 at 19:27:40 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> My old company's product, Zortech C++, was also very popular in Germany, England, and Japan. I don't know why.
>
> And a certain spot in the Netherlands, because at the time it outperformed all the others like Borland Watcom IBM/visual-age ms-visual-c++ and others at compilation speed and most of the time in execution speed as well. Besides since we used multiple compiler on our code base symantec/digitalmars often reported violations were the other happily accepted the code (and produced wrong code) And the incident response time from you was just marvelous, reported an issue, next morning a fixed compiler version in the emailbox!
>
> Beside that, I really appreciated the so called IDDE and accompanied srcs of libs. It was imo much much better than VC++ at the time. Have used it for a very long time even after Symantec ditched it. (borland f***** up theirs by forcing the C++ builder upone us)
>
Sounds a lot like D of today, too!
(Thanks for the kind words. I appreciate it!)
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March 17, 2018 Re: D beyond the specs | ||||
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Posted in reply to Aurélien Plazzotta | On Friday, 16 March 2018 at 18:38:44 UTC, Aurélien Plazzotta wrote:
> On Friday, 16 March 2018 at 11:44:59 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> Would it be possible to find out at DConf in Munich why exactly D is so popular in Germany (my impression) and in other countries of Europe (and that general post code) like France, Italy, GB, Romania and Russia etc.?
>
> To the best of my knowledge, there is currently no job offer in D programming in France. It is not even required/highlighted as a second/bonus skill to apply for a job.
>
> Perhaps it is used within a research and development department of very few companies for very specific tasks but it's unheard of and the mentalities of top management won't change before long because we are a retarded population who needs a lot of safety nets and huge amounts of guarantees to actually to take action...
>
> Also, french citizens don't like taking financial and technological risks, now adopting D for profesionnal use is a big one.
And yet in Paris lives a man, presumably a French citizen, who was working on a cryptocurrency scaling startup last dconf and that ended up being part of the path towards launching Bitcoin Cash. So some French citizens don't seem to mind taking risks or trying new things, and if there is a dampening of entrepreneurial spirits it might be the government and culture. That's just one example, but the outliers can often tell you more than those in the centre of the distribution.
It seems like it's already beginning to change slowly. It wasn't long ago that speaking about the French startup scene was more like the punchline to a joke. Today it's something real and I think will grow further from here.
Things change slowly in the beginning. Top management aren't the ones to start doing something creative unless they are a highly unusual kind of firm. It's people who can decide or who don't need to ask anyone's permission that are the early adopters.
Anyway I asked Walter about why so many Germans in the D community. No final answer. It's interesting that Walter is of German descent. A controversial topic, but in my experience what you are from shapes who you are, how you think and what you value. And receptivity to a particular way of doing things isn't uniform across the world.
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March 17, 2018 Re: D beyond the specs | ||||
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Posted in reply to Guillaume Piolat | On Saturday, 17 March 2018 at 16:26:27 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> While France is all about status (titles, living well over your means), and people prefer to learn "high-status" languages, I guess this is the profile of late adopters everywhere.
Yes, status seems one of the most important things for normal people.
But there's a repeating pattern in life. A small group, drawn to do something for intrinsic reasons starts to create something. And they get no face because it seems completely unrealistic and in truth the odds are very much against success. But they create something excellent because they care about intrinsic reasons and not social factors. And some people start to take notice, but it's still more or less a fringe but interesting project. And it stays that way until the world changes, and changes in a way that looks obvious with hindsight but nobody really expected at the time. At that point what's important changes and the project starts to become popular. Then people more ambitiously than intrinsically motivated start to be drawn by what's now obvious and the project starts to be popular, and yet with that popularity comes a change in its nature and sometimes people think back to the old days.
So I think that pattern might apply to D, and if that's right one might as well focus on the challenges before one and enjoy the benefits from the present makeup of the community. Because as adoption grows eventually the makeup will change too.
If you're good and care about what's important, eventually status comes to you. And now you've got more problems to worry about. But life isn't about banishing problems, but overcoming them.
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March 17, 2018 Re: D beyond the specs | ||||
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Posted in reply to Laeeth Isharc | On Saturday, 17 March 2018 at 20:17:17 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> ... A small group, drawn to do something for intrinsic reasons starts to create something. And they get no face because it seems completely unrealistic and in truth the odds are very much against success. But they create something excellent because they care about intrinsic reasons and not social factors. And some people start to take notice, but it's still more or less a fringe but interesting project. And it stays that way until the world changes, and changes in a way that looks obvious with hindsight but nobody really expected at the time. At that point what's important changes and the project starts to become popular. Then people more ambitiously than intrinsically motivated start to be drawn by what's now obvious and the project starts to be popular, and yet with that popularity comes a change in its nature and sometimes people think back to the old days. ...
Just like the Linux project - started by a Finnish guy.
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March 17, 2018 Re: D beyond the specs | ||||
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Posted in reply to Laeeth Isharc | On 3/17/2018 1:02 PM, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> Anyway I asked Walter about why so many Germans in the D community. No final answer. It's interesting that Walter is of German descent. A controversial topic, but in my experience what you are from shapes who you are, how you think and what you value. And receptivity to a particular way of doing things isn't uniform across the world.
I'm German, Dutch, and English. But I grew up in America, so culturally I'm American.
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March 18, 2018 Re: D beyond the specs | ||||
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Posted in reply to Ola Fosheim Grøstad | On 03/17/2018 02:31 AM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote: > I don't know about compilers specifically, but the big distributors in > Europe charged some hefty margins on their imports. So pricing in US was > often much lower than here... It may not be distributor greed: I was one of the founders of a WordPerfect distributor in Turkey in around 1991. When retail price was around $500, we were paying around $400 to WordPerfect when US consumers were getting it for something like $120 at retail shops. (I cannot be sure about the amounts after all those years.) I don't know whether it was the US government rules or WordPerfect rules but they simply could not sell us anywhere near what US consumers were paying. $500 in Turkey is still an impossibly high price. We survived for a while selling to large companies. Ali |
March 18, 2018 Re: D beyond the specs | ||||
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Posted in reply to Ali Çehreli | On Sunday, 18 March 2018 at 07:06:37 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote: > It may not be distributor greed: I was one of the founders of a WordPerfect distributor in Turkey in around 1991. Cool :-) > I don't know whether it was the US government rules or WordPerfect rules but they simply could not sell us anywhere near what US consumers were paying. $500 in Turkey is still an impossibly high price. *nods* I find it kinda interesting that the global distribution that came with the Internet may have made it more difficult to differentiate prices, both ways. Also harder to sell with lower margins in 3rd world countries. E.g. on Amazon you can now find cheaper reprints of textbooks targeting universities in India... Of course, localized software (language barrier) may still be used to differentiate. |
March 20, 2018 Re: D beyond the specs | ||||
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Posted in reply to Laeeth Isharc | On Saturday, 17 March 2018 at 20:02:01 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: > > And yet in Paris lives a man, presumably a French citizen, who was working on a cryptocurrency scaling startup last dconf and that ended up being part of the path towards launching Bitcoin Cash. So some French citizens don't seem to mind taking risks or trying new things, and if there is a dampening of entrepreneurial spirits it might be the government and culture. > That's just one example, but the outliers can often tell you more than those in the centre of the distribution. Yes, the government and beaurocrats in the administration etc. more often than not dampen the entrepreneurial spirit in Europe. Then again, people prefer security over freedom, because it involves risk, this attitude in turn feeds the "riskophobic" nanny state which in turn feeds people's risk-aversion (hen or egg?) and so on till the whole thing collapses or people get sick and tired of it. > Things change slowly in the beginning. Top management aren't the ones to start doing something creative unless they are a highly unusual kind of firm. It's people who can decide or who don't need to ask anyone's permission that are the early adopters. A common conversation when the top management is "confronted" with a new idea: Manager: "Has anyone ever done that before?" Foot soldier: "Err, no. It's a new idea." Manager: "Then we won't do it either!" > Anyway I asked Walter about why so many Germans in the D community. No final answer. It's interesting that Walter is of German descent. A controversial topic, but in my experience what you are from shapes who you are, how you think and what you value. > And receptivity to a particular way of doing things isn't uniform across the world. I agree. That's why I started this thread. I already suspected that Walter had German anscestors, but didn't dare to ask (you know how things are these days ;) And maybe herein lies part of the answer. Maybe that's why D is a mixture of pragmatism (Anglo-Saxon) and (sometimes obsessive) attention to detail (German). And maybe this tension between pragmatism and perfectionism attracts more and more programmers as it not only reflects the problems they encounter in their daily work, but opens up a whole new field of possibilities / opportunities both in terms of language development and problem solving. Other things that have been said so far are very interesting, i.e. the recent developments that leave languages like D some space to breathe. I've noticed that it is increasingly harder for big corporations to force their technologies (i.e. languages) on programmers, for various reasons, one of which is the certainly the fact that many programmers and coders have become wary and / or tired of language hypes - and the bitter experience that you always end up in a cul-de-sac at whose end sits a stubborn committee that develops a given language along ideological lines and not according to what people need. |
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