On 8/15/18 5:31 PM, Matheus wrote:
> On Wednesday, 15 August 2018 at 20:45:34 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> ... We are in talks with a few more students from Romania and Brazil...
> 
> I'm from Brazil and I use D for hobby projects. It would be nice to present them later, in fact I was interested to create D group around here and maybe these Brazilian students may help.
> 
> Matheus.

Will keep that in mind. BTW there's a fledgling idea to hold a C++/D/systems programming conference in Belo Horizonte.

On Wednesday, 15 August 2018 at 22:12:55 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 8/15/18 5:31 PM, Matheus wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 15 August 2018 at 20:45:34 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> ... We are in talks with a few more students from Romania and Brazil...
>> 
>> I'm from Brazil and I use D for hobby projects. It would be nice to present them later, in fact I was interested to create D group around here and maybe these Brazilian students may help.
>> 
>> Matheus.
>
> Will keep that in mind. BTW there's a fledgling idea to hold a C++/D/systems programming conference in Belo Horizonte.


Hi @Andrei and @Matheus,

Regarding this conference in Brazil, that would be fantastic! +1. I live in Curitiba (which is in the South of Brazil), but I'd totally fly to Belo Horizonte to attend. I've just discovered D recently, and it's a joy to code in D.

Please, keep me posted.

On Wednesday, 15 August 2018 at 20:45:34 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 8/13/18 5:50 AM, Joakim wrote:
>> [...]
>
> Thanks for the info. That's good for Nim and something we could definitely benefit from as well. Currently, Sebastian Wilzbach and Razvan Nitu, both students, are working full time with the Foundation. Mike is our publishing and general PR person, working a reliable part time. We are in talks with a few more students from Romania and Brazil.

Good to know, didn't know Seb and Razvan were full-time.

> Our early experiments with bountysource were sadly unsuccessful. I'm not writing it off but we'd probably need a new angle for a new round of experimentation. Suggestions are welcome.

I've never liked that bountysource website overall, but it does provide a way to fund specific issues.

> Regarding corporate sponsorship, we have been public about being interested, but we haven't exactly beaten off offers with a stick. I have personally asked our top users in several instances for assistance. There has been some, but not to the extent of allocating one or more full-time engineers. Shout out to Laeeth Isharc whose enterprise has been far and away the most generous, and to Weka as well for sharing with us some time and resources at a crucial juncture for the company.

Good to hear those options are being explored.

> We've always been glad to take suggestions from individual collaborators. Mike Parker would be the person to reach out to. What would be best is to get some concrete action; historically, the typical suggestion came in the form "here's this great idea, you go work on it". Even that is fine if the idea is fleshed out and argued convincingly. Better yet, there's no better proof that an idea is good than to actually execute it to demonstrable benefit.

OK, I'll try that then. The first step is to figure out what people want to pay for, so I will open a forum thread for that. Perhaps such feedback can also guide the funding targets on Opencollective, in addition to the survey data already collected.

It's always good to steal insights from wherever you legitimately can.  There's often more treasure in areas utterly different from your field of activity than in those that on the face of it fall into the same category.

I think that in the hedge fund business for example I've learnt more in recent years from choirs, alternative wine makers that break the rules, open source communities, the Rotary Club, observations of artistic scenes, pondering what the punk Tom Jennings told me back in the day, and so on than I have from competitors in my field.

I think each language community is founded on its own unique principles and trying to squash it onto a box that doesn't fit isn't going to go anywhere.

D doesn't need a big corporate sponsor.  It already has some corporate sponsors and now there is a beginning made with the D Foundation and enterprise adoption across many different sectors it's just a matter of nourishing the beginning we have and helping it unfold.

The idea of any corporate sponsor having much luck with influencing the development of the language in a direction it doesn't want to go anyway is most entertaining to contemplate.  Remedy Games asked for attributes I think - a really good idea - and even then there was grumbling.  Not that I mind the grumbling.

You know money is valuable but creative energy and involvement is much more so, even though you can't eat the latter.

I am hoping in time that we would inspire others to see the benefits of being involved and I think that will happen.

ICO sponsorship or from divers companies across many domains - I know which one I think creates the best foundation for future success.

I did try funding bounty source but there doesn't seem to be much action there.

I hope Nim succeeds too - it looks like a nice language and it's an amazing accomplishment for a small core team.  Languages are not after all in a battle to the death - life is not a zero-sum game.

My biggest challenge right now is hiring more of the right kind of programmers given that it takes a lot of time to find them the conventional way and I would like to keep raising the bar and not lower it.

It's a firm where people matter so if someone wants to work on open source projects that are in a direction that helps the direction of the firm one day a week then it's something we can be open to for the right person.

And if we end up continuing to find more strong people via the D community then it's easy to justify increasing our contribution.  Headhunters charge 20% of first year's salary, after all, and they mostly don't have good taste and it ends up taking a lot of time I don't have.

In a world where the system of credentials has broken down, what is left that still works?  Focal points, resonance, sample work, and recognition by those who have reputation already.

Maybe in a decade we will be reminiscing about those wonderful times before people realised there are great jobs in D.  Success ultimately attracts a different kind of person - every moment in time is good for some purpose.

On Tuesday, 14 August 2018 at 07:05:12 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Tuesday, 14 August 2018 at 02:49:58 UTC, Mike Franklin wrote:
>> On Monday, 13 August 2018 at 09:50:29 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>> Announced last week, the Nim team will be adding two full-time paid devs and setting up grants for needed projects with this new funding:
>>
>> :jealous:
>>
>>> However, there are other ways to raise funds. Companies using D could use the existing bountysource page to put up bounties for features/fixes or projects they need, to which community members who need some particular feature/fix could also donate:
>>>
>>> https://www.bountysource.com/teams/d
>>
>> I think bountysource would work if the bounties were significantly higher, but there are also the funding options at https://opencollective.com/dlang
>
> Yes, some of those bounties are too low for the amount of work, but nothing stops others who find them important to increase the bounty incrementally.
>
>> Looking on the right column of the page there are several D enthusiasts contributing their hard-earned money to D.  Maybe there's a better option for the masses, besides a T-shirt and a DConf discount, that might encourage more donors.  For example, I might contribute somewhere between $100 or more if I could get some attention on some bugs/features that I care about (assuming I couldn't implement them myself).  Maybe I'll post a bounty in the near future and see how it goes.
>
> A variation on that appears to be in the cards, as they've said there will be more funding targets:
>
> https://forum.dlang.org/post/orvcznlvraunkksjdgez@forum.dlang.org
>
> I don't really care which website is used, bountysource or opencollective or whatever, but the community is unlikely to contribute unless they have a clear idea of where the money is going, which bountysource does a better job of showing right now.
>
>> Right now, I'm the only one I know of working on the #dbugfix stuff, but I'm finding the bugs submitted this round exceptionally difficult.  I don't know if I'll succeed with a fix this round (Sorry!), but contact me directly, or post an announcement on the forum, if you have a bug that you're willing to motivate with a financial contribution to the D Foundation, and I'll personally take a look at it.  I'm generally only capable of fixing some of the more simple bugs, as my skills and understanding of DMD are quite limited, but I promise I'll try.
>
> This is not about me: I personally don't have any blocker bugs that I'm worried about. I'm concerned about the general pace of D development: I don't think we're as focused or organized on gathering resources as we should be. My preferred model is to turn D into a partially proprietary product, but I guess the core team doesn't like that approach:
>
> https://forum.dlang.org/thread/okuzksqzczprvuklpzaw@forum.dlang.org
>
> Back when I was a little kid decades ago, I had a neighbor who used to build model trains in his garage, what he did in his spare time. I remember seeing it then and being thrilled that it snaked all over his work area. 99% of open source projects are the "model trains" of software devs, something they work on for fun in their spare time, and never get used widely.
>
> To get into the 1% of OSS projects that are actually widely used, you need some way to gather resources to grow the project. There's the linux model where you get a bunch of consulting and support companies to use you. There's the llvm/clang model where you become a product in a large company, part of their portfolio alongside proprietary products or modules that pay the bills. There's the Firefox model where you sell ads alongside the OSS product. There's new models where you use crowdfunding sites like kickstarter or opencollective.
>
> D has so far used very little of any of these models. This project can give off the impression that it is simply a big model train for Walter and Andrei, a hobby that they've retired to work on. Instead, I'd like to see D much more widely used, which means work needs to be done on gathering resources beyond what the project has now.

Have you read Peter Thiel's Zero to One and seen his YouTube talks on secrets etc?

He says what I have always believed.  I think market share is a legitimate approach if that's your cup of tea, but dominating a niche is a much better one if it fits you.  I personally just by virtue of who I am as a person found that as a life strategy having a very high appeal to a tiny minority of people suits me by far better (I like to think they are the best people but who is really to say as it depends on your point of view).

I truly don't think it's relevant what most people think of D at this point.  The world is a very big place and there's room for many languages and I don't think there will be another C - that was a creature of its time, and time and conditions have changed since then.

Most code is enterprise code that nobody much hears about and I guess most programmers are paid to work on enterprise code.  The tech guys get an inordinate share of attention because of social reasons and because the nature of their business fits with talking much more about what they are doing.  But I don't think they represent a majority of the code that's written.

D is a very practical language and that means it's quite a good tool for enterprise users if such users are at this point rather unusual sorts of people able to make up their own minds in the absence of marketing and advice from consultants - they also need to be people that have the authority to decide to do what's best without persuading a committee.

We are in an age that doesn't tend to be very patient about enduring temporary discomfort - with D the discomfort is all upfront.  So you need to be both imaginative to see the longer term benefits and an unusual sort of person to press through the early discomfort.  This makes D a great hiring filter if you are at the stage of business development where we are today, but it's not going to convince many pointy-headed bosses.  So much the worse for the pointy-headed bosses.

People are using D to do real work.  As people do that they naturally need to make improvements, and why wouldn't you open source those ?

The way a broader audience comes to D will be as a result of early successes and because of the calibre of the people that are earlier adopters of D.  And more importantly because of the calibre of people in the D community.  Throw a stone at dconf - if you hit a bad programmer you probably missed and hit someone from a different conference in the adjacent ballroom.  In the outside world things are not always like that.

If you want D to be more widely used then focus on what can be done to help the people who are already using it in a small way to succeed and use it further, and help people who want to use it and almost can but face impediments that might not be difficult to overcome but are from where they are sitting.

It's much better to focus on what's to hand and growing steadily than to worry about trying to get D to a certain stage of popularity.  These things aren't under human control.  The setup must be there but then things happen when a bunch of conditions inside and out come together all at the same time.

There's a magic when someone solves their own problem that's real for them.

Goldman Sachs have their own internal languages for charting and analysing data.  Pretty good stuff for the 1990s but they had a whole team working on them full-time.

Me, I wanted a DSL too for similar if more nuanced reasons, but my resources were considerably less.  Some of my evenings and weekends and a couple of very talented part-time developers.  I knew of Pegged and had played with it, but it didn't become that vivid that it wouldn't be that bad to write the whole thing till I had dinner with Bastian at dconf.

Why bother writing a DSL?  Because it's by far easier to register types and functions of existing code and not just D code but C# and Python.  And one can impose restrictions that don't reduce power much but make integration of various codebases and services across the firm much easier.

I wrote it for one purpose and turns out it's useful for others I never even thought of. Our risk reports across the firm are being rewritten in it and now I'm wondering about accounting.  I actually wrote it originally to do what Bloomberg custom expressions should perform but never will.

Anyway that's the path to it being used more I think.  People you have never heard of adopting it in a small way and then in a larger way and then sharing their experiences with others.

I don't even want to think about the time I spent manually translating headers for C libraries.  Now with DPP that's no longer a problem.  In time it will probably work for C++ libraries too.

The barrier to introducing D into an existing C codebase just keeps coming down.

I use EMSI containers.  They at least downloaded excel-d.  So there's a positive spillover dynamic already underway.  Give it time and the consequences will become more evident.

On Wednesday, 15 August 2018 at 22:12:55 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 8/15/18 5:31 PM, Matheus wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 15 August 2018 at 20:45:34 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> ... We are in talks with a few more students from Romania and Brazil...
>> 
>> I'm from Brazil and I use D for hobby projects. It would be nice to present them later, in fact I was interested to create D group around here and maybe these Brazilian students may help.
>> 
>> Matheus.
>
> Will keep that in mind. BTW there's a fledgling idea to hold a C++/D/systems programming conference in Belo Horizonte.

I would most definitely fly back to Brazil to attend and/or speak at that! Belo Horizonte no less, where I have free lodging. :)

On Friday, 17 August 2018 at 00:06:27 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> On Tuesday, 14 August 2018 at 07:05:12 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> [...]
>
> Have you read Peter Thiel's Zero to One and seen his YouTube talks on secrets etc?
>
> [...]

Nothing here contradicts my stated goals and method: increasing the usage and adoption of the D language by the community paying for more work on the language and libraries.

I think there should be a marketplace in such paid work on D, one that largely doesn't exist right now. In your language of economics, that market isn't clearing. Why is this?

It could be there hasn't been enough sustained effort to create a market. It could be there are simply too few buyers. It could be there is a culture of doing everything for yourself. It could be some OSS people dislike money being involved. It could be people are happy to free-ride off major voluntary contributors like Walter, Andrei, Iain, and Martin and don't care or need to see D speed up its development.

It could be I'm an outlier in wanting D to get more resources and move faster. We shall see.