On Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 19:44:11 UTC, Brian Schott wrote:
On Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 18:36:39 UTC, SomeDude wrote:
I think at this point, what D needs is a bit of commercial
support from a company like JetBrains or some equivalent.
Maybe there is now an opportunity for founding such a company,
one that would specialize in building professional tools
around the D language. I believe the language and the
compilers are stable enough to grow a serious business around
them. If we compare to what the state of C++ compilers was
before 2000, I believe we are much better off. And that was
just over a decade ago. Who knows what the state of D will be
in 5 years ? So yes, there is a case to be made for growing a
company around pro D tools, and the first company that does it
will grab the whole market.
It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. I'd like to do this,
but there would have to be several companies already using D
professionally for it to be a viable business model. And for a
company to invest in D, they'd probably want the tooling to
already exist.
Your concern is legitimate of course, but there has been
historically many cases where small companies have created a
market in IT. There is clearly a demand for D tooling even if
it's not huge right now, so I believe the risk is not as great as
you think. Of course one needs some good skills to be able to
come up with usable tools. But when nearly every D newcomer's
first question is "where are the tools ?", there is a market for
that.
