On Wednesday, 4 February 2015 at 03:52:26 UTC, Laeeth Isharc
wrote:
Excellent post. This situation is very obvious to us at
Sociomantic, as we're at the forefront of a massive disruption
that is happening in the advertising industry. D has far
better prospects in disruptive technology, rather than trying
to compete with incumbents in the rapidly disappearing
traditional desktop market.
Thanks, Don. I am honoured that you took the time to read
through all of this, and appreciate the feedback. Every now
and then I question whether I am headed in the right direction
to use D (not because of anything lacking in D, but because it
is less conventional, and because I have been away from the
pulse of technology for a very long time). Your industry is a
little different, and my needs for the time being are not even
soft real-time (although that could easily change). But from
listening to your talk, I am pretty sure you know what you are
doing, and wanting high productivity when dealing with
potentially quite respectably sized data sets is one shared
aspect - so that is a source of comfort.
Thanks! Yes, I think that larger data sets are not well served by
existing languages. And ease of handling large data is actually
more significant than raw performance. Domains like ours are at
least as much I/O bound as CPU-bound, and ability to adapt
rapidly is very important.
Could I ask you one thing, not directly relating to D? Why did
you pick Berlin to launch your startup? (You in the corporate
sense, I mean).
Perhaps Berlin chose the company, rather than the other way
around :)
The companies' founders all grew up in East Germany, I think they
were just living in Berlin.
But, there are a huge number of startups in Berlin. It's a place
with great infrastructure, low costs, and available talent. So
it's certainly an attractive place to launch a startup.
"First published in 1997, Christensen's book suggests that
successful companies can put too much emphasis on customers'
current needs, and fail to adopt new technology or business
models that will meet their customers' unstated or future
needs" --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
I thought: "they put too much emphasis on backwards
compatibility" ...
Haha - I know you have been one of the proponents of breaking
changes. I think that is a distinct question from the other
stuff, and guess it is not easy for the language leaders to
balance the different demands - impossible not to make one
group unhappy. Someone cynical might say it is easier for you
take that position if you are still mostly on D1, and so don't
pay the same price others would.
Yes, that's true, and so my opinions should be slightly weighted
downwards. But even so, the reality is that bugfixes cause
breakages anyway. Most code that isn't actively being maintained,
is broken already. If you're an early adopter, you expect to have
a lot of breakage pain.
The thing that is frustrating is when decisions are made as if we
were much further along the adoption/disruption cycle, than where
we actually are.
We don't yet have huge, inflexible users that demand stability at
all costs.
There was widespread agreement on this, from all of the eight
companies at DConf who were using D commercially.
Breaking changes aside, one can't say there isn't a sustained
dynamism to the development of D.
Yes. Though I wonder if we are putting too much emphasis on being
a replacement for C++; I fear that the better we become at
replacing it, the more we will duplicate its problems. But that's
just a niggling doubt rather than a well-reasoned belief.
