On Friday, 13 March 2015 at 15:17:06 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
On 3/13/15 7:51 AM, Chris wrote:
On Friday, 13 March 2015 at 14:34:23 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
On Fri, 2015-03-13 at 14:20 +0000, Chris via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
[…]
reluctant to learn something new. Crowd 2. we can win over,
yet we
have failed to communicate with them, to reach out to them.
Most
people I know have a look at D's homepage and say "Uh! Hm.
Ah, I'll
use Python." No, they are not hardcore programmers, they are
engineers and scientists. But they are _users_, people who
need to
write software to analyze data, to create something. We
should not
ignore them, even if they are not (initially) interested in
templates
and metaprogramming. Neither was I, when I first learned D.
It is not Python or R or Julia the language that people
choose, it is
the superstructure built on top. So for Python, it is Pandas,
Matplotlib, SciPy, NumPy. And the ability to use ready made
C, C++ and
Fortran libraries.
Exactly, that's part of it. People don't understand that they
can use
all the C libraries with D as well. And if they do, "extern
(C)" is too
"complicated", at least more complicated than "import
numbergrind". I'm
really at loss here, I don't know how to communicate these
things to
people. Colleagues and text books that talk about R and Python
weigh so
much more than "D can actually interface to C without any
effort".[1]
Also, sometimes I have the impression that people use any
excuse not to
use D.
That may as well be basic psychology at work. Curb appeal (or
lack thereof) is difficult to explain but is easy to
rationalize with unrelated arguments.
There is something loosely related to curb appeal that has been
discussed here before. Consider someone just starts with D and
wants to figure whether there's a startsWith function in D.
So they google for something like ``dlang startswith''. Nicely
enough http://dlang.org/phobos/std_algorithm.html comes up
first. (Ideally the individual page
http://dlang.org/library/std/algorithm/starts_with.html would
come up.)
Anyhow, assuming the user clicks on the former, startsWith is
easy to find at the top and then when you click on it...
====
uint startsWith(alias pred = "a == b", Range, Needles...)(Range
doesThisStart, Needles withOneOfThese) if (isInputRange!Range
&& Needles.length > 1 &&
is(typeof(.startsWith!pred(doesThisStart, withOneOfThese[0])) :
bool) && is(typeof(.startsWith!pred(doesThisStart,
withOneOfThese[1..$])) : uint));
bool startsWith(alias pred = "a == b", R1, R2)(R1
doesThisStart, R2 withThis) if (isInputRange!R1 &&
isInputRange!R2 &&
is(typeof(binaryFun!pred(doesThisStart.front, withThis.front))
: bool));
bool startsWith(alias pred = "a == b", R, E)(R doesThisStart, E
withThis) if (isInputRange!R &&
is(typeof(binaryFun!pred(doesThisStart.front, withThis)) :
bool));
====
This in big bold font, too. The HTML way of saying, "you wanted
startsWith? I'll give you more startsWith than you can carry."
Picture the effect this has on someone who just wanted to see
if a string starts with another.
We need to make the template constraints distinct for
formatting in ddoc.
Sadly http://dlang.org/library/std/algorithm/starts_with.html
is bad in other ways. It doesn't have any examples! In
contrast, the unified page does have some decent examples.
This all is under the "curb appeal" category.
Andrei
Yep. This is part of the "make people feel good about it"
approach. Plus, we're not selling shit, it's really a good
product. In a way, we do it the other way around: bad marketing
for a good product.
