On Monday, 12 January 2015 at 05:02:36 UTC, Joakim wrote:
Yeah, it seems to be a big deal. D may end up needing what it
doesn't appear to have: some business genius to go along with
its language design prowess. The "switching costs" are far too
high right now. Even the ideal programming language could only
be so much better than what already exists.
I don't know about "genius," simply a small to mid-sized
company like Embarcadero that's willing to invest into putting
10-20 paid devs on producing and selling a polished
compiler/runtime/stdlib would do.
I'm saying that assembling and funding such a team will require
some business genius at this point. Maybe Sociomantic will
provide, a couple years from now, when Dicebot and others are
finished porting their codebase? But seriously, let's keep the
question simple. How do you get to that 10-20 dev team? Who wants
D that bad, and is willing to suffer the capital investment? I
don't want to sound negative, but it strikes me as a *really*
hard sell.
I'm not a marketing expert (well, perhaps ipso facto), but I
think that in order to prosper in the current climate D needs
a better brand. "Modern convenience. Modeling power. Native
efficiency."... isn't good enough. Not to disparage the
effort that went into creating that slogan, but for one thing,
it's not even honest, insofar as D does not yet provide modern
convenience, as Manu Evans has so dishearteningly pointed out.
(It's becoming painfully obvious that convenience is
absolutely not about language - it's about ecosystem, and D
simply doesn't have that yet.)
I don't have a problem with the brand. D is convenient enough
for me in terms of features, though I certainly don't push it
as far as Manu does. As for the library ecosystem, that's
always a slog to bootstrap for any new language.
A newbie goes to the front page of dlang.org, tries D and has the
kind of experience Manu recently lamented with his own team.
Modern convenience? It's false advertising. It's not knowing who
you are. It doesn't how matter much anybody *wants* D to be
convenient. Modern convenience would be a gamer changer,
absolutely, if we had it. But it's about infrastructure - that's
what convenience *is*. Convenience is not about core product.
What the slogan is saying is completely different from what D's
leaders think it's saying. It's saying that D is for language
geeks who know how to bypass all lack of modern convenience. It's
saying that D is for people who think convenience is only about
language and not infrastructure, documentation, and tooling, i.e.
language geeks - people who love to try new languages and will
put up with lack of everything else, etc. - perhaps 10% of
programmers. I'm not saying D really *is* for language geeks. I'm
saying that's what D is *saying* it is, *without even knowing it*.
Convenience, to me, is one-click downloading from the home page,
one click installation, and full IDE support akin to what Apple,
Microsoft and any other behemoth has done for their language. The
language has nothing to do with it. D can't even remotely compete
with these languages in terms of convenience. It needs a new
slogan, and it can't get one until it knows what it is. Here's a
suggestion: "A Language for Programmers". It would obviously need
to be vetted by the big wigs, but from my perspective, it's
already a real brand without any extra work. I wonder if they'll
agree with me?
