September 24, 2015 Re: Indicators and traction… | ||||
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Posted in reply to Joakim | On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 10:51:09 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> btw, Walter wrote up a nice article in 2012 laying out all he had to go through to get dmd working on Win64:
The beauty of Windows though is you don't actually need to do anything to actually work on the new versions. Your old tricks generally still work.
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September 24, 2015 Re: Indicators and traction… | ||||
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Posted in reply to Dmitry Olshansky | On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 11:25:57 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky wrote: > On 24-Sep-2015 13:51, Joakim wrote: >> No wonder Windows is a dying platform, given what he laid out there. > > Much as I'd like that to be true, the opposite might be the current situation. See all the new shiny and dead-simple APIs or Windows 10 Universal Apps ... > > And you know where most developers flow - like watter - where it's easiest to pass. Oh, if you use one of the established languages that MS already supports fully through their toolchain, I don't doubt it's easy. However, perhaps you're unaware, but there's a lot of hand-wringing in the Windows camp about how nobody develops for Windows anymore and Microsoft themselves are developing first for other OS's: https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/android/3174/windows-android https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/5818/and-the-biggest-problem-with-windows-10-is https://www.thurrott.com/office/5904/because-microsoft-comes-first-not-windows-or-surface Part of that is that Windows failed on mobile, which is where a lot of new app development takes place these days. But part of it is that MS seems stuck in the past, with issues like not documenting their debuginfo format, where they still act like an OS monopoly when they're not even the majority computing platform anymore. They've got to up their game to stay relevant, but perhaps they're not capable of that anymore. On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 13:04:38 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote: > On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 10:51:09 UTC, Joakim wrote: >> btw, Walter wrote up a nice article in 2012 laying out all he had to go through to get dmd working on Win64: > > The beauty of Windows though is you don't actually need to do anything to actually work on the new versions. Your old tricks generally still work. Yes, all the old win32 apps still work on win64. But you not only need legacy support but new apps coming on board. That's where they're failing, and not enabling new languages is part of the problem. |
September 24, 2015 Re: Indicators and traction… | ||||
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Posted in reply to Joakim | On 24-Sep-2015 17:22, Joakim wrote: > On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 13:04:38 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote: >> On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 10:51:09 UTC, Joakim wrote: >>> btw, Walter wrote up a nice article in 2012 laying out all he had to >>> go through to get dmd working on Win64: >> >> The beauty of Windows though is you don't actually need to do anything >> to actually work on the new versions. Your old tricks generally still >> work. > > Yes, all the old win32 apps still work on win64. But you not only need > legacy support but new apps coming on board. That's where they're > failing, and not enabling new languages is part of the problem. For instance, x64 SEH is actually beautiful and supports any language out of the box. Innovations happens on both (or rather on all) sides of the fence. -- Dmitry Olshansky |
September 24, 2015 Re: Indicators and traction… | ||||
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Posted in reply to Dmitry Olshansky | On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 15:35:40 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
> For instance, x64 SEH is actually beautiful and supports any language out of the box. Innovations happens on both (or rather on all) sides of the fence.
Nobody is denying that there are still innovations happening in Windows. The problem is that they still act as though they own the market, when they're now the minority computing platform. Worse, the larger platforms' toolchains are much more open, so they look much worse by comparison. They need to stop shooting themselves in the foot, if they want to survive. Personally, I don't mind if they don't. :)
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September 24, 2015 Re: Indicators and traction… | ||||
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Posted in reply to Chris | On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 09:48:24 UTC, Chris wrote: > On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 23:00:29 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: >> On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 16:22:35 UTC, Joakim wrote: >>> >>> To break out to an early majority, D will have to prove itself, ie the innovators and early adopters have to show empirically that it is working better for them and allowing them to do more. >> >> I think you are spot on. > > I agree. Conventional marketing won't get us far at this stage. We agree (although the theory of marketing I think points in the same direction I described, whether or not that's what people understand by marketing). > Thank you. Nicely put. Mind you, a lot of complaints are not related to the language itself (as others have said), but are secondary issues like IDEs (one-click-debug-compile-run-deploy-go-for-coffee-magic) and libraries, which are logically a step you take _after_ a language has been created. It's an ecosystem and things co-evolve. Why do the documentation and IDE options fall short of what many newcomers might expect? Because the community seems to me to be comprised of serious programming types, and for such people the importance of documentation and IDEs is less than it might be for others. That's a strength of the community, not a weakness, but it just means at this time those aren't especially selling points of D (although it's improving every year). At some point the dynamics will change and either existing D IDEs will become good enough, or someone will be motivated to write one. > These things do make a difference. At least for the Python crowd. But be prepared that people might attack you saying that with C++ it would be 10-20% faster than D, because D has GC blah blah blah. Yes, but the reason it takes him an hour today whilst he is putting money to work behind this strategy is that the alternative to the internal scripting language is C++, and that will cost time and money. Having to make a business case for something often means that projects with a high return on investment don't get done, or take a long time to be done, because of the human factors. And if you have to wait 3 minutes (remember, this is on my home machine with dmd debug mode) or 2.7 minutes, it's not an important difference. Because I still remember what I was thinking when I ran the study. But after an hour I have completely forgotten and will be doing something else. Of course you can scale up to more machines, but the cost of adding complexity for a small tool isn't zero, even if the cost of raw horsepower is close to zero. > The amount of random criticism that is thrown at D, confirms, imo, that it is really good, else people wouldn't bother to attack it so passionately. Only really good creations are attacked with a passion - be it in art or technology. Yes - that's very insightful. I wonder why that is. Laeeth. |
September 24, 2015 Re: Indicators and traction… | ||||
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Posted in reply to Laeeth Isharc | On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 18:39:34 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 09:48:24 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> The amount of random criticism that is thrown at D, confirms, imo, that it is really good, else people wouldn't bother to attack it so passionately. Only really good creations are attacked with a passion - be it in art or technology.
>
> Yes - that's very insightful. I wonder why that is.
Similarly, I've heard it said that D programmers have no problem criticizing D while still using it because of how good we think it is, whereas the proponents of some other languages freak out if you say anything negative about their language at all (though I don't think that the D community is completely immune to that - especially in the context of D vs some other language rather than when just talking about D and how it could be improved).
- Jonathan M Davis
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September 27, 2015 Re: Indicators and traction… | ||||
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Posted in reply to Nick Sabalausky | On 24 September 2015 at 01:09, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> 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. 'Most' developers are mediocre-at-best. They are the developers we need to attract. They are the critical mass, and they represent momentum. The enthusiasts are already here. > This is engineering, not fucking fashion. You're familiar with JS, MongoDB, Ruby on rails, etc, etc? Software engineers are firmly engaged in fashion. > Popularity has no place in decision making here. Sadly, false. > 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. So, you agree and recognise the truth. We need to appeal in terms of a popularity contest. That's the way forward ;) |
September 27, 2015 Re: Indicators and traction… | ||||
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Posted in reply to Manu | On Sunday, 27 September 2015 at 03:34:31 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On 24 September 2015 at 01:09, Nick Sabalausky via
>> Popularity has no place in decision making here.
>
> Sadly, false.
As much as it would be nice to not have decisions based on popularity, we _do_ want D to be popular regardless, and while we want to be technically superior, we don't actually need to convince people on those grounds. We just need to convince them. If that means convincing many of the better programmers via technical merit and many of the rest via pure popularity, then so be it. There's no reason why we can't succeed on both fronts, though it's arguably easier to make headway based on technical merit, since that's easier to control and doesn't require becoming popular first.
- Jonathan M Davis
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September 27, 2015 Re: Indicators and traction… | ||||
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Posted in reply to Jonathan M Davis | On 27 September 2015 at 16:45, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
> On Sunday, 27 September 2015 at 03:34:31 UTC, Manu wrote:
>>
>> On 24 September 2015 at 01:09, Nick Sabalausky via
>>>
>>> Popularity has no place in decision making here.
>>
>>
>> Sadly, false.
>
>
> As much as it would be nice to not have decisions based on popularity, we _do_ want D to be popular regardless, and while we want to be technically superior, we don't actually need to convince people on those grounds. We just need to convince them. If that means convincing many of the better programmers via technical merit and many of the rest via pure popularity, then so be it. There's no reason why we can't succeed on both fronts, though it's arguably easier to make headway based on technical merit, since that's easier to control and doesn't require becoming popular first.
This :)
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September 29, 2015 Re: Indicators and traction… | ||||
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Posted in reply to Manu | On 09/26/2015 11:34 PM, Manu via Digitalmars-d wrote: > On 24 September 2015 at 01:09, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d >> This is engineering, not fucking fashion. > > You're familiar with JS, MongoDB, Ruby on rails, etc, etc? Software > engineers are firmly engaged in fashion. > Oh, I definitely know. And it irritates me to no end :/ > > We need to appeal in terms of a popularity contest. That's the way forward ;) > Yea, I do agree, just find it really annoying ;) |
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