On Monday, 5 August 2013 at 19:44:12 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
This is a bit of a generic reply to a constant theme I see here.
It pains me to see a lot of great D projects languish in
obscurity, and often the author(s) eventually get frustrated
with that and abandon them.
The problem is that "Field of Dreams", i.e. "build it and they
will come" is a Hollywood fantasy. The authors simply must
promote it. That means, at the barest minimum, writing a nice
article that answers the basic questions:
who
what
where
when
why
how
and then getting that article published & promoted in social
media, online magazines, etc. Note that online magazines are
BEGGING for content. Some will even PAY MONEY for decent
content.
Throwing code up on github isn't good enough. Expecting people
to read the source code to figure out who/what/where/etc is
never going to work. A one line announcement "Hi! I just
released Dxxxxx! Enjoy!" is going to fail. Hoping that others
will pick up the flag and carry it for you is a pipe dream.
I know that people often are reluctant to promote their own
stuff because they feel it's immodest. All I can say is get
over it! Look at Donald Trump, Steve Jobs, Gene Simmons, Jeff
Bezos, Elon Musk, etc. None of them are/were remotely shy about
promotion.
Besides, it's fun when others read one's articles and comment
on them, a lot more fun than waiting to be discovered.
Wow Walter, your post really motivated me right now. For a few
days I have this idea about an next gen OS. I only told it to my
friends and I haven't written it anywhere(but I was planing to).
Now I will probably create a blog and start writing programming
articles and explaining ideas I have and projects I work on. But
the thing that you said about promoting counts for D too. The D
community is rather small compared to other languages. But in
recent days I see more and more people starting talking about it.
From time to time I see a post about D in reddit and probably
Dconf '13 boosted the growth. I really hope that D one day
becomes a success and I will try to write and promote D too in my
non-currently-existent blog :)
