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…

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

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…

I think a good project where D/Phobos would work great is a 3d printer fw.
All 3d printer firmwares are written in c/c++.

3d printers' firmwares deal with a lot of algorithms / printer architectures / components / multithreading where D + Phobos would simplify the development. If you have ever checked 3d printer firmware you know what I'm speaking of

We should get TV commercials.

I'm not even really kidding, when I see something advertised on television, it plants a seed in my brain that this brand is serious and mainstream. After all, they were able to secure a spot on my local channel!

We're talking about perception here and there may not be a technical solution to that. It is a marketing problem and what do professional marketers do to make an impression of their product?


It'd probably cost like a million dollars to sponsor Jeopardy! or something though.

On 09/23/2015 08:19 AM, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d 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."
>

While I agree this is something we need to address, I gotta say: I *strongly* consider that attitude to be highly indicative of a mediocre-at-best developer.

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.

On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 12:19:48 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:

> 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…

Nobody uses a language because the language is good, they use it for what they can get done with it.

If someone wants to write a web app, they can look at vibe.d, but they will find documentation written for experts. I was thoroughly confused when I tried to read it (probably because I've only done a limited amount of web programming) but I wrote a minimal, working PHP app in 30 minutes.

If someone wants to write a GUI app, they can look at gtkd, but I'm not sure how many will stick around when they click on the documentation link and encounter this: http://api.gtkd.org/src/gtk/AboutDialog.html

Someone wanting to do scientific programming is going to have to reinvent the wheel. Hopefully that will change, but it's the current state of affairs. I can even point to my own project to embed D in R, a project that works but that I wouldn't recommend, because it's neither properly documented or finished.

I'm sure others could add to the list. Once these things are under control, we can worry about marketing.

On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 15:09:53 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On 09/23/2015 08:19 AM, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d 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."
>>
>
> While I agree this is something we need to address, I gotta say: I *strongly* consider that attitude to be highly indicative of a mediocre-at-best developer.
>
> 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.

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. That doesn't necessarily mean that such folks are mediocre programmers. They simply have priorities and learning a better language for the fun of it or simply for pet projects doesn't necessarily fit with those priorities. The more that D fits in with those priorities (e.g. the more jobs there are where D actually gets used), the more that many programmers will be interested in D.

Obviously, there's more to learning a programming language than learning a tool that you're going to be using at work, or most of us wouldn't be here, but not everyone is able to spend enough free time on programming to learn new languages for the fun of it, and many of those that could would rather spend their time actually programming something than learning a new tool.

I completely agree that programmers should learn multiple languages, and I would very much like to see technical merit win over simple popularity, but popularity does have a significant effect on which languages people use and which survive, and there's a definite argument to be made that there's less value in learning a language which isn't likely to be used much outside of pet projects. The simple fact that language X has more traction than language Y will generally help language X gain further traction regardless of which is technically better. We certainly hope though that the technical advantages of D will help it gain further traction so that we don't have quite so much of a chicken and egg problem there.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 13:58:09 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> We should get TV commercials.
>
> I'm not even really kidding, when I see something advertised on television, it plants a seed in my brain that this brand is serious and mainstream. After all, they were able to secure a spot on my local channel!
>
> We're talking about perception here and there may not be a technical solution to that. It is a marketing problem and what do professional marketers do to make an impression of their product?
>
>
> It'd probably cost like a million dollars to sponsor Jeopardy! or something though.

Television is a bit pie-in-the-sky, but I think you may be on the right track.  For example, I know I've seen conferences/conventions that have some advertisement in their program books.  Sure, it won't have the shotgun reach of the telly, but...well, I don't know about you all, but I don't even own a TV.

Though targeted ads on Youtube might work?  Adwords?  Other advertising networks?

-Wyatt

On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 15:09:53 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On 09/23/2015 08:19 AM, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d 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."
>>
>
> While I agree this is something we need to address, I gotta say: I *strongly* consider that attitude to be highly indicative of a mediocre-at-best developer.
>
> 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.

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.

On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 15:12:13 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> I'm sure others could add to the list. Once these things are under control, we can worry about marketing.

Hopefully when DMD is refactored and documented it will provide an avenue for marketing DMD as a nice codebase for people who want to experiment with compiler programming.

I'd like to see cross compilation to other languages: asm.js, javascript, Go...

I think there's potential there: strengthen D compile time features and use D as a meta programming language that can emit source code libraries for other languages that lacks meta programming.

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.

> 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".

I wouldn't call them D's "enemies". The difference is that languages like Go are designed to get as many users on board as possible in order to lock them in and create dependencies (like proprietary operating systems, OS X or MS Windows). D's philosophy is different, it genuinely wants to offer a good tool that everyone can use without trying to lock anyone in. I'm no longer sure, if marketing would make a big difference. 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)