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.


Andrei

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.
>
>
> Andrei

In your mind, what defines the D language's level of success?

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.

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.

Yes, I think this state would be a good indicator of success. This requires attracting developers with strong technical ability and good leadership to manage it. I think requires cultivating a community that rewards good work and encourages contribution. When I was heavily contributing, it was because of people like Seb and Mike who would review pull requests and tried to keep the flow of work moving.  But many time it was quashed by other developers and eventually it didn't make sense for me to contribute anymore when dozens of hours of good work can't get through.  If this doesn't change, D won't be able to keep good developers.

I posed this question to Andrei because I really want to know the answer.  The success of a language can mean very different things to each person. The most important aspect of D for me is its continuing progress towards stability/robustness.  Though I would say that the language could be considered the best in the world with its balance of safety, performance and practicality, it is very far from perfect.  In my mind, D becomes more successful as the language itself becomes better. And if D doesn't continue to improve, it will be supplanted by new languages that continue to be created at an astounding rate.

Others may consider D's popularity to be the most important indicator of D's success.  I think everyone would agree this is important, however, I would much rather use a good language on my own then a mediocre language with everyone else.

I will also say that in order to read that article and apply it to "D's success", you most certainly need to know exactly what that means to identify what D's leverage points are. It was an interesting article. Many of the concepts were familiar and it was interesting to see them all laid out in a simple model and prioritized.  Thanks for the link Andrei.

On 20/08/2018 1:51 AM, Jonathan Marler wrote:
> 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.
> 
> Yes, I think this state would be a good indicator of success. This requires attracting developers with strong technical ability and good leadership to manage it. I think requires cultivating a community that rewards good work and encourages contribution. When I was heavily contributing, it was because of people like Seb and Mike who would review pull requests and tried to keep the flow of work moving.  But many time it was quashed by other developers and eventually it didn't make sense for me to contribute anymore when dozens of hours of good work can't get through.  If this doesn't change, D won't be able to keep good developers.

We need a dedicated project manager to facilitate communication and to keep PR's and issues moving. Nobody to my knowledge is taking on this role and Walter definitely isn't able to do it (which he shouldn't be doing anyway).

It may be easier to ask for a company to donate somebody to fill this role than it would be to get developers from them. Either way, we need to hire somebody into this role. Because right now, we haven't got somebody who sits on the fence about issues, who's only goal is to keep everybody working together.

This release of dmd should have had a fully reloadable frontend in it. But alas somebody does disagree with me on some fundamental enough points that the PR is now pretty much dead after sitting since DConf. Worse than that was it was only the beginning of the PR's required to make it happen.

Point is, somebody should have either forced me to make a change that I disagreed with or had it pulled. But alas, all I see is my desire to rewrite the parser growing (bad sign).

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.

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

Of course, all he has to do is go to the front page of dlang.org and follow those links others gave him, but maybe he means something really big like google's search engine.

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.

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.

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.

On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 18:49:53 UTC, Joakim wrote:


> 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.

I've got a series on Sociomantic in the works for the blog.

On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 19:11:03 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 18:49:53 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>
>
>> 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.
>
> I've got a series on Sociomantic in the works for the blog.

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.

I'm not saying stuff like that isnt valuable, just that it's not gonna crank the faucet very much compared with stuff like "The D xml parser smokes the competition"

It would also help dispel the impression that D is kindof stagnant.

On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 19:52:44 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
> Stuff like that, hey we made D much better now, not stuff about some corporate user who does targeted advertising.

I'm of the complete opposite opinion.

Everyone like to make money, especially more than the industry average; and we should push the narrative that using D lets you print money in unsuspecting markets (and that's really not far from the truth).

In Reddit recently there was than comment:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/97q9sq/why_d_is_a_good_choice_for_writing_a_language/e4ce7kx

Who wants to be the competitor getting crushed by the competition because of not using a nimbler, faster language to develop in?*
Yet that sort of thing happens a hell of a lot in practice.

Constant factors matters a lot when you work on high-performance software, if you can develope 30% faster for the same result then it's a huge competitive advantage.


> I'm not saying stuff like that isnt valuable, just that it's not gonna crank the faucet very much compared with stuff like "The D xml parser smokes the competition"

I think that doesn't really move the needle, every native programmer knows that native languages are approximately as fast and that the fastest program had more engineering hours in it. It is _possible_ to have the faster program in any (native) language, now _how long_ will it take?

However if you can have something more featureful with less effort that doesn't run slower then it's appealing. Benchmarks where development time is missing just tell half the story.

On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 21:59:15 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> On Sunday, 19 August 2018 at 19:52:44 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:

> I'm of the complete opposite opinion.
>
> Everyone like to make money, especially more than the industry average; and we should push the narrative that using D lets you print money in unsuspecting markets (and that's really not far from the truth).

That's a hard argument to make. I mean it's a good selling point but how do you convince people that D actually does what you say it does?


> In Reddit recently there was than comment:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/97q9sq/why_d_is_a_good_choice_for_writing_a_language/e4ce7kx
>
> Who wants to be the competitor getting crushed by the competition because of not using a nimbler, faster language to develop in?*
> Yet that sort of thing happens a hell of a lot in practice.
>
> Constant factors matters a lot when you work on high-performance software, if you can develope 30% faster for the same result then it's a huge competitive advantage.

Yeah of course, but we're talking about blog posts, press releases, what will get people to even bother clicking on the posts to actually read them. Of course productivity is a big sell, but i think it's also important to be seen to be making progress on the language and ecosystem. And you're talking about getting non D users to click. It's not just about whats important it's about what will make people take notice.


> I think that doesn't really move the needle, every native programmer knows that native languages are approximately as fast and that the fastest program had more engineering hours in it. It is _possible_ to have the faster program in any (native) language, now _how long_ will it take?
>
> However if you can have something more featureful with less effort that doesn't run slower then it's appealing. Benchmarks where development time is missing just tell half the story.

I didn't mean to say that runtime performance is all that's important although I completely understand why it looked like that. What I'm trying to say is that to generate interest the posts or articles have to have a bit of a bang. Either show real progress, or real advantage.