August 20, 2018 Re: [OT] Leverage Points | ||||
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Posted in reply to Dave Jones | On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 19:52:44 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
>
> What you need a blog post saying the GC has been made 4x faster. Stuff like that, hey we made D much better now, not stuff about some corporate user who does targeted advertising.
If you look through the blog, you'll find posts like that. One of the most-viewed is titled, 'Find Was Too Damn Slow, So We Fixed It' [1]. There are a variety of posts that we've published. I started the series on Funkwerk last year because we needed more posts about D being used in production.
But we're constantly in need of content of all types. So anyone involved in obtaining a 4% speedup in garbage collection and knows the details well enough to write about it is invited to do so.
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August 20, 2018 Re: [OT] Leverage Points | ||||
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Posted in reply to Walter Bright | On Saturday, 18 August 2018 at 22:20:57 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: > On 8/18/2018 9:59 AM, Jonathan Marler wrote: >> In your mind, what defines the D language's level of success? > > It no longer needs me or Andrei. I think that is a pretty weak measure. Stroustrup and Matsumoto are still actively tending their babies decades later. A better measure is that "it is the language of choice for programming activity." Note the fine print there. * Choice. ie. Programmers _want_ to use it, not are constrained to use it. * For programming activity, not new projects. ie. The era of vast tracts of green field programming is long gone. We're mostly in the era tinker toys and tidying. By tinker toys I mean gluing and configuring large frameworks and packages together. While the industry does a huge amount of tinker toy development, and has massive package and dependency management tools.... we're still not Good at it. There is a big difference between "Doing a lot of" and "Being Good at". By tidying I mean refactoring legacy code that is way too large and complex to rewrite all at once. ie. A "successful" language of the 2020's is one that can "play nice" with the vast pile of legacy. > in increasing order of effectiveness > 12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards). The cost of starting to use D. > 11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows. The size of pool of people who know of, and know D. > 10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures). Current projects, tools and packages using D. > 9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change. Time to bug fix, time to answering a newbies question, time to handle and roll out a dip. > 8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against. The effect of bad experiences with D. Bugs in compiler and libraries. > 7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops. The positive effects on productivity and programmer happiness in using D. > 6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information). How well does information flow from the experts to the newbies. How hard is to create and get accepted new info. > 5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints). Incentives tend to be, "My change, my suggestion, my package was accepted or accepted up to a bunch of constructive feedback suggestions" Punishments tend to be rejection, especially dismissive or insulting. Constraints tend to be number of and pain due to bureaucratic hoops one has to jump through. > 4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure. There is a strong push to lock the language standard and standard library down solid. But this merely results in a language and language ecosystem (cough python 3) that cannot evolve. A better goal would be to provide rewrite tools that would allow the language ecosystem to evolve with the language. ie. You need a compiler that reads AND rewrites code! > 3. The goals of the system. If the D language evolution is directed at ever smaller and less relevant corners of programming activity, yes, it will die. If it is directed and enabling and enriching ever larger portions of the programming activity, it will thrive. > 2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises. ie. Is the mindset to create a language, or to create a language that is so compelling it will dominate the language landscape. > 1. The power to transcend paradigms. D is fairly well positioned to take on many of the current language paradigms. This question is more about if a new one comes along, does D absorb it? Or wilt? Again I come back to that rewrite tool. How fast can you evolve the language, the standard library and the whole language ecosystem? If the answer is like, python 3, or perl, no sorry, it takes years. Or like C++, we're going to dance carefully on a head of pin for decades to avoid obsoleting anything. Then your rate of evolution will be the same as or slower than the competing languages. |
August 20, 2018 Re: [OT] Leverage Points | ||||
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Posted in reply to Joakim | On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 18:49:53 UTC, Joakim wrote: > On Saturday, 18 August 2018 at 13:33:43 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: >> A friend recommended this article: >> >> http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ >> >> I found it awesome and would recommend to anyone in this community. Worth a close read - no skimming, no tl;rd etc. The question applicable to us - where are the best leverage points in making the D language more successful. > > I read the whole thing, pretty much jibes with what I've already realized after decades of observation, but good to see it all laid out and prioritized, as Jonathan said. > > I thought this paragraph was particularly relevant to D: > > "So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded." > > This pretty much reflects what Laeeth always says about finding principals who can make their own decisions about using D. "Places of public visibility and power" for D are commercial or open-source projects that attract attention for being well done or at least popular. Read Vilfredo Pareto on the circulation of the elites, Toynbee on the role of creative minorities, and Ibn Khaldun on civilisational cycles. There's not much point focusing on the influential and powerful people and projects of today - they have too much else going on; powerful people tend to become a bit disconnected from reality, complacent and they and hangers-on have too much vested in the status quo to change. When you have nothing, you have not much to lose, but after considerable success most people start to move to wanting to keep what they have. This doesn't bring open-mindedness to new ideas or approaches. But we live in a dynamic economy and time and the winners of tomorrow might look unremarkable today. Linus said it was just a hobby project, nothing big like Minix. Would you have thought a few German PhDs had a chance with no capital, starting amidst a bad financial crisis and using a language that was then of questionable stability and commercial viability? New things often start small, growing at the fringe where there's no competition because at that point it's not obvious to others there is even an opportunity there. It's much better to appeal to new projects or commercial projects where people are in pain and therefore open-minded because suffering will do that to you. D is a general purpose quite ambitious language so I wouldn't expect necessarily that there is a pattern by industry or sector. Probably it will be organic and grass-roots. You have one unusual person in an unusual situation who is open to trying something different. And in the beginning it might not look like much, particularly to outsiders. Note that when you start a small business it takes a long time before you hire significant numbers of people usually. Yet in the US SMEs create more than 100% of the jobs. So there is a lag between people starting to play with D and them doing a lot in it or hiring many people to work with it. Five years even isn't a long time. Perceptions also take a long time to change, but they do tend to catch up with reality eventually. When I started looking at D in 2014 it really wasn't yet ready for primetime. The compiler would crash too often for comfort, and I wasn't even trying to do anything clever. The std.algorithm docs were perfectly clear - if you had a training or sort of mind that understood formalisms. But j tried to interest one ex trader in D - he could work with Python but back then he was absolutely terrified of the Phobos documentation. It's much better today, but the reaction from past improvements is still unfolding. Little things like dpp /dtoh combined with BetterC can make a huge difference I think. Being able to incrementally replace a C codebase without having to do lots of work porting headers (and keeping them in sync) brings down cost of trying D a lot. If DPP works for C++ so you can just #include <vector> then even better but it will take some time. I am trying to persuade Atila to have possibility to just handle some types as opaque. You can always write shims for the parts of the API you need but at least this way you can #include cpp headers and get something. > I'm not sure we're doing a good job of publicizing those we have though, here's a comment from the proggit thread on BBasile's recent post about writing a language in D: > > "I keep seeing articles telling me why D is so great, but nothing of note ever gets written in D." > https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/97q9sq/comment/e4b36st I don't think it matters a lot what people like that think. In aggregate yes, but as Andrei says people are looking for an excuse not to learn a new language. Somebody actually ready to try D will sooner or later come across the organisations using D page and see that the situation is a bit different. One observation - people getting work done aren't going to be in the forums much and they may not have time to spend writing blog posts. It's different for a regular business than a large tech company. So Michael plays a very valuable role in making these as easy as possible for end users to tell their story. > We could probably stand to publicize D's commercial successes more. I've been trying to put together an interview blog post with Weka about their use of D, got some answers this summer, but no response in months to a follow-up question about how they got their team trained up on D. We could stand to talk more about Sociomantic, D's biggest corporate success so far, I'll put out an email to Don. Maybe Laeeth would be willing to do an interview. Sounds a good idea. > On the OSS front, I've sent several interview questions to Iain earlier this year about gdc, after he agreed to an interview, no responses yet. Tough to blame others for being ignorant of D's successes when we don't do enough to market it. I think we are still in very early stages. Lots of companies in orgs using D I don't know much about. The Arabia weather channel have a YouTube on their use of D, but I don't speak Arabic. Hunt the Chinese toy company is interesting. Chinese tech scene is huge and very creative, possibly more so than the US in some ways. You might ask EMSI and also AdRoll. By early days I mean it's better to look for interesting stories where people are doing real work on a small scale with D than trying to find super impressive success stories only. > Finally, regarding leverage, I keep pointing out that mobile has seen a resurgence of AoT-compiled native languages, but nobody seems to be trying D out in that fertile terrain, other than me. I did try, but it's not exactly easy to make a complete app in D, even on Android. It would be great if there were some way to automatically wrap the APIs. |
August 20, 2018 Re: [OT] Leverage Points | ||||
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Posted in reply to Mike Parker | On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 03:04:30 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 19:52:44 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
>
>>
>> What you need a blog post saying the GC has been made 4x faster. Stuff like that, hey we made D much better now, not stuff about some corporate user who does targeted advertising.
>
> If you look through the blog, you'll find posts like that. One of the most-viewed is titled, 'Find Was Too Damn Slow, So We Fixed It' [1]. There are a variety of posts that we've published. I started the series on Funkwerk last year because we needed more posts about D being used in production.
Im not trying to be negative but if Nim or Rust released a blog post saying "We made find faster" is it going to get you to try them out? Is it enough of an enticement to get over you preconceptions about those languages and to think maybe they are worth a try?
That's what Im trying to say. Im sure posts like that are popular within the D community but they are not going to make much headway bringing new users in.
But the extension of that is that you need to have something enticing to write about and there seems to be very little happening at the moment. DPP is probably the most interesting thing happening atm.
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August 20, 2018 Re: [OT] Leverage Points | ||||
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Posted in reply to Laeeth Isharc | On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 04:46:35 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: > On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 18:49:53 UTC, Joakim wrote: >> On Saturday, 18 August 2018 at 13:33:43 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: >>> A friend recommended this article: >>> >>> http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ >>> >>> I found it awesome and would recommend to anyone in this community. Worth a close read - no skimming, no tl;rd etc. The question applicable to us - where are the best leverage points in making the D language more successful. >> >> I read the whole thing, pretty much jibes with what I've already realized after decades of observation, but good to see it all laid out and prioritized, as Jonathan said. >> >> I thought this paragraph was particularly relevant to D: >> >> "So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded." >> >> This pretty much reflects what Laeeth always says about finding principals who can make their own decisions about using D. "Places of public visibility and power" for D are commercial or open-source projects that attract attention for being well done or at least popular. > > Read Vilfredo Pareto on the circulation of the elites, Toynbee on the role of creative minorities, and Ibn Khaldun on civilisational cycles. > > There's not much point focusing on the influential and powerful people and projects of today - they have too much else going on; powerful people tend to become a bit disconnected from reality, complacent and they and hangers-on have too much vested in the status quo to change. When you have nothing, you have not much to lose, but after considerable success most people start to move to wanting to keep what they have. This doesn't bring open-mindedness to new ideas or approaches. Sure, and though I've not read any of those books, where did I suggest going after the "influential and powerful?" I simply echoed your statement about going after principals who are free to make their own path, who as you've stated before are usually at startups or small projects where everything doesn't have to get past a committee. > But we live in a dynamic economy and time and the winners of tomorrow might look unremarkable today. Linus said it was just a hobby project, nothing big like Minix. Would you have thought a few German PhDs had a chance with no capital, starting amidst a bad financial crisis and using a language that was then of questionable stability and commercial viability? Yes, the next great kernel developer or Sociomantic is looking for the language to write their project with now. Hopefully, D will be the right choice for them. >> I'm not sure we're doing a good job of publicizing those we have though, here's a comment from the proggit thread on BBasile's recent post about writing a language in D: >> >> "I keep seeing articles telling me why D is so great, but nothing of note ever gets written in D." >> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/97q9sq/comment/e4b36st > > > I don't think it matters a lot what people like that think. In aggregate yes, but as Andrei says people are looking for an excuse not to learn a new language. Somebody actually ready to try D will sooner or later come across the organisations using D page and see that the situation is a bit different. Looking at his proggit comment history now, he seems exactly like the kind of intelligent, opinionated sort D should be attracting: I don't think he was looking to dismiss D. He could have looked harder, we could have marketed harder: there's blame to go around. >> I'll put out an email to Don. Maybe Laeeth would be willing to do an interview. > > Sounds a good idea. Alright, I'll email you soon. >> On the OSS front, I've sent several interview questions to Iain earlier this year about gdc, after he agreed to an interview, no responses yet. Tough to blame others for being ignorant of D's successes when we don't do enough to market it. > > I think we are still in very early stages. Lots of companies in orgs using D I don't know much about. The Arabia weather channel have a YouTube on their use of D, but I don't speak Arabic. Hunt the Chinese toy company is interesting. Chinese tech scene is huge and very creative, possibly more so than the US in some ways. > > You might ask EMSI and also AdRoll. > > By early days I mean it's better to look for interesting stories where people are doing real work on a small scale with D than trying to find super impressive success stories only. We're doing both: most of the material on the D blog and my own D interviews are not with corporate representatives. We could stand for more of the latter though, especially the big successes, because people are more influenced by them. Many devs use large corporate deployments as a litmus test of whether they should explore a new tech. To the extent that we've never published a blog post about Weka, only offhand mentions like when Andrei visited Israel, that is a big marketing failure for D. I know the Weka guys are very busy, but the further success of D will only help them too, so they're undercutting themselves by not making sure that blog post gets done. >> Finally, regarding leverage, I keep pointing out that mobile has seen a resurgence of AoT-compiled native languages, but nobody seems to be trying D out in that fertile terrain, other than me. > > I did try, but it's not exactly easy to make a complete app in D, even on Android. It would be great if there were some way to automatically wrap the APIs. Right now, the Android port is more suited for writing some performant libraries that run as part of an existing Android app. The kind of polish you're looking for will only come with early adopters pitching in to smooth out those rough edges. On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 08:31:15 UTC, Dave Jones wrote: > But the extension of that is that you need to have something enticing to write about and there seems to be very little happening at the moment. DPP is probably the most interesting thing happening atm. How about this? The latest release of ldc, 1.11, is the first one to ship with a mostly working AArch64 port, which is the most widely used CPU architecture for personal computing these days as it powers billions of mobile devices (most iOS devices and about half of Android devices). This is the culmination of years of patches worked on by core devs on the ldc and gdc teams- David, Ian, Kai, Johannes, and so on- to which I recently added the Android portions. I'm now able to write and compile D executables _on_ my 5.5" Android/AArch64 smartphone using ldc 1.11, the same device on which I'm writing this long forum post, using a bluetooth keyboard. I've kicked off a build using the Termux build scripts and will soon be submitting a pull so you can do the same on your Android phone or tablet, after running this simple command in the Termux app for Android, `apt install ldc`: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.termux&hl=en I'll start writing up a post for the D blog about the Android port, after I edit the wiki page to show how to build for Android/AArch64 too: https://wiki.dlang.org/Build_D_for_Android |
August 20, 2018 Re: [OT] Leverage Points | ||||
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Posted in reply to Joakim | On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 11:55:33 UTC, Joakim wrote: >>> "So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded." (Quoting from the article I think). Kuhn and Lakatos. Paradigm shifts don't take place when the dominant paradigm is defeated by logical or empirical means. Paradigm shifts take place when for some reason people say "how about we stop talking about that, and start talking about this instead". I think he described certain political changes in the Western World beginning in the mid to late 60s rather well. I don't think it describes how changes in the sphere of voluntary (non-political ie market and genuine civil society) activity unfold. Supposing it were a good idea (which it isn't), how would one be able to to insert people in places of public visibility and power who put forward a point of view that is very different from the prevailing one? Only via a program of entryism, and I don't think that in the end much good will come of that. So I think the original author has cause and effect the wrong way around (not too surprisingly because he is talking about things that relate to politics and activism). [NB one shouldn't mention the Club of Rome without mentioning what a failure their work was, and it was predictably and indeed predicted to be a failure for the exact same reasons it failed]. It isn't that you insert people representing the new paradigm in positions of influence and power. It is that people from the emerging new paradigm - which is nothing, a bunch of no-hopers, misfits and losers viewed from a conventional perspective - by virtue of the fact that it has something useful to say and has drawn highly talented people who recognise that start ever so slowly to begin things and eventually to accomplish things - still on the fringes - and over time this snowballs. After a while turns out that they are no longer on the fringes but right at the centre of things, in part because the centre has moved. The best illustration of this phenomenon was I think in a work of fiction - Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. I never expected someone to write a novel based on a mailing list - the cypherpunks. It was about as surprising to me then as it would be to see Dlang - the movie - today. And of course that itself was an early indication that the ideas and ways of thinking represented by what was originally quite a small community were on the ascent. >>> This pretty much reflects what Laeeth always says about finding principals who can make their own decisions about using D. "Places of public visibility and power" for D are commercial or open-source projects that attract attention for being well done or at least popular. Well - I understand what you mean, but I don't recognise this as being my point. Principals who can make their own decisions probably aren't today highly visible and visibly powerful. The latter comes much later on in the development of a project, movement or scene and if you're visible it's a tax that takes time away from doing real work. By the time you're on the front cover of Time or The Economist, it's as often as not the beginning of the end - at least for anything vital. > We're doing both: most of the material on the D blog and my own D interviews are not with corporate representatives. We could stand for more of the latter though, especially the big successes, because people are more influenced by them. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to go for big stories. But it's a mistake to place the attention people today naturally tend to. It doesn't matter what influences most people - it matters what influences the person who is poised on the edge of adopting D more widely, adopting D as a beginning, or would be if they knew of the language. The latter is quite a different sort, I think. Liran at Weka picked up D because he saw Kent Beck post on Twitter about Facebook's Warp written in D (or maybe it was a linter) and it seemed like an answer to a particular problem he had (if I am remembering correctly). It wasn't because of a grand thing - it was because of a little thing that seemed like it might be a creative solution to a real problem. Signal:noise is much higher away from the limelight too. By far better to have a high share of attention in some specific domains or interest groups than to have a low share of attention of some enormous market. > Many devs use large corporate deployments as a litmus test of whether they should explore a new tech. To the extent that we've never published a blog post about Weka, only offhand mentions like when Andrei visited Israel, that is a big marketing failure for D. > > I know the Weka guys are very busy, but the further success of D will only help them too, so they're undercutting themselves by not making sure that blog post gets done. Well, someone could just take the key insights and experiences from their talks, write them up, check with them and post. The latter are a considerable commitment already for a startup that's hitting a revenue growth phase. There are lots of things for them to be busy with beyond just the technology. > >>> Finally, regarding leverage, I keep pointing out that mobile has seen a resurgence of AoT-compiled native languages, but nobody seems to be trying D out in that fertile terrain, other than me. >> >> I did try, but it's not exactly easy to make a complete app in D, even on Android. It would be great if there were some way to automatically wrap the APIs. > > Right now, the Android port is more suited for writing some performant libraries that run as part of an existing Android app. The kind of polish you're looking for will only come with early adopters pitching in to smooth out those rough edges. If we had autowrap for JNI and could dump the types and method prototypes as part of the pre-build process, what would the next stage be to be able to just call Android APIs from D and have them work? JNI isn't that bad (I know it's deprecated) and I used it already from D in a semi-wrapped way. So I wonder how much more work it would be to have autowrap for JNI. I didn't use reflection on the Java side because I wasn't wrapping that much code. Are there XML descriptions of Android APIs you could use to generate wrappers? |
August 20, 2018 Re: [OT] Leverage Points | ||||
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Posted in reply to Dave Jones | On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 08:31:15 UTC, Dave Jones wrote: > On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 03:04:30 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: >> On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 19:52:44 UTC, Dave Jones wrote: >> >>> >>> What you need a blog post saying the GC has been made 4x faster. Stuff like that, hey we made D much better now, not stuff about some corporate user who does targeted advertising. >> >> If you look through the blog, you'll find posts like that. One of the most-viewed is titled, 'Find Was Too Damn Slow, So We Fixed It' [1]. There are a variety of posts that we've published. I started the series on Funkwerk last year because we needed more posts about D being used in production. > Im not trying to be negative but if Nim or Rust released a blog post saying "We made find faster" is it going to get you to try them out? That is the wrong question to be asking. It isn't how branding works (just because D doesn't try and manufacture an image doesn't mean that that itself doesn't create a brand). A post like that is one element in a campaign that gets across what D is like as a language and a community. I would guess many people that have no attention of trying D might read that because it's an interesting topic covered in an interesting way. By far not every post needs to be a call to action, and in fact people that try to do that become extremely annoying and get filtered out. That's an old-fashioned approach to marketing that I don't think works today. > Is it enough of an enticement to get over you preconceptions about those languages and to think maybe they are worth a try? I think the relevant question is at the margin of activation energy - the person poised on the edge, not the representative Reddit or Hacker News poster. D is a very practical general-purpose language, and that means most users over time will be in enterprises given that I guess most code is written in enterprises (or maybe academe - and lots of academic code isn't really open-sourced even if it perhaps should be). Large enterprises aren't going to be early adopters of things they didn't create themselves. And people in SMEs have a different calculus from the representative influential person that talks publicly about technology. Have you noticed too how people that actually use D in their business don't spend much time on forums? > That's what Im trying to say. Im sure posts like that are popular within the D community but they are not going to make much headway bringing new users in. I disagree. I started using D before the blog, but it was that kind of thing that drew me in, and one way and another as a consequence more new users than me have been brought in. > But the extension of that is that you need to have something enticing to write about and there seems to be very little happening at the moment. DPP is probably the most interesting thing happening atm. I think there is lots interesting happening. Dpp (No more manual writing of bindings); Android aarch64; web assembly; continuing improvements in C++ interop; Symmetry Autumn of Code; D running in Jupyter (it excites me, even if nobody else); opMove; the take-off of Weka (from what I have heard); Binderoo generating C# wrappers for D programmatically; a really quite useful betterC (you can use a lot of language and library now); betterC version of Phobos will keep growing thanks to Seb's work on testing; no-gc exceptions; DIP1000 and scope; LDC fuzzing and profile-guided optimisation; GDC moving towards inclusion in GCC finally; adoption of D in bioinformatics; other games companies following in Remedy's footsteps. I haven't even had time to follow forums or github much, but that's all just off the top of my head. |
August 20, 2018 Re: [OT] Leverage Points | ||||
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Posted in reply to Laeeth Isharc | On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 12:26:25 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: > On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 11:55:33 UTC, Joakim wrote: >>>> Finally, regarding leverage, I keep pointing out that mobile has seen a resurgence of AoT-compiled native languages, but nobody seems to be trying D out in that fertile terrain, other than me. >>> >>> I did try, but it's not exactly easy to make a complete app in D, even on Android. It would be great if there were some way to automatically wrap the APIs. >> >> Right now, the Android port is more suited for writing some performant libraries that run as part of an existing Android app. The kind of polish you're looking for will only come with early adopters pitching in to smooth out those rough edges. > > If we had autowrap for JNI and could dump the types and method prototypes as part of the pre-build process, what would the next stage be to be able to just call Android APIs from D and have them work? JNI isn't that bad (I know it's deprecated) and I used it already from D in a semi-wrapped way. So I wonder how much more work it would be to have autowrap for JNI. > I didn't use reflection on the Java side because I wasn't wrapping that much code. Are there XML descriptions of Android APIs you could use to generate wrappers? For example, could we make something like this for D? https://github.com/opencollab/giws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIWS_(software) The above requires the user to specify the types in XML, but I guess you can dump them via reflection. I have done some work on wrapping given the types in the internal code below (which won't build by itself). It was written in a hurry and I didn't know Java, D, or JNI very well at the time: https://github.com/kaleidicassociates/import-java-d |
August 20, 2018 Re: [OT] Leverage Points | ||||
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Posted in reply to Dave Jones | On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 08:31:15 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
n production.
>
> Im not trying to be negative but if Nim or Rust released a blog post saying "We made find faster" is it going to get you to try them out? Is it enough of an enticement to get over you preconceptions about those languages and to think maybe they are worth a try?
The majority of the page views on the blog overall come from reddit, twitter and (for the posts that are shared there) HN. That particular post generated a lot of feedback in the reddit comments, much of it positive. The same for Walter's BetterC posts. That sort of content is what people like to discuss, and when that discussion is positive it's a net win for D. Whether that specific post brought anyone in is irrelevant.It certainly influenced opinions about D to some degree.
Programming languages aren't impulse buys. When you read enough thoughtful articles about a language and see enough positive discussion about it, it will be more likely to come to mind later on down the road when you're looking for something new. I'm working on another project right now that I intend to use together with the blog to continue to build that sort of capital.
As for the content, separate that which I target toward the D community and that which I target outside the community. The former goes to /r/d_language and the latter to /r/programming. Invariably, the latter gets many more page views. How that translates into a conversion ratio in actually bringing people to give D a try I couldn't say. I only measure feedback in terms of page views and discussion.
I'm continually learning new things about the content, from little things about how seemingly innocuous lines can set off a massive negative thread in reddit to broader concepts about what kinds of content do well with the right taglines. That influences how I write my own posts, what sort of content I'm looking for at any given moment, and how I edit posts. I'm also always on the lookout for new ideas.
The type and quality of content is not a concern from my perspective. I've got a good handle on that. The bigger issue is quantity. I need more people submitting content. Period.
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August 22, 2018 Re: [OT] Leverage Points | ||||
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Posted in reply to John Carter | On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 03:57:10 UTC, John Carter wrote: > * Choice. ie. Programmers _want_ to use it, not are constrained to use it. > * For programming activity, not new projects. ie. The era of vast tracts of green field programming is long gone. We're mostly in the era tinker toys and tidying. That's a matter of choice, some are tidying, but there's a lot of green field programming even in C, and new languages are all green fields. > There is a big difference between "Doing a lot of" and "Being Good at". That's why you can't be tidying all the time, you can improve, but can't become good this way. > By tidying I mean refactoring legacy code that is way too large and complex to rewrite all at once. Nobody is going to deep refactoring; example: C/C++ (well, you mention them too) and pretty much everything. And it's that large because it accumulated garbage and rewrite will cut it to a manageable size; example: s2n (fun fact: it's written in C, but uses slices for safety just like D). |
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