On Monday, 16 March 2015 at 13:16:33 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
On Monday, 16 March 2015 at 08:54:20 UTC, Joakim wrote:
On Monday, 16 March 2015 at 08:33:43 UTC, Zach the Mystic
wrote:
I see D attracting *really* good programmers, programmers
from, let's say the 90-95th percentile in skill and talent in
their field on average. By marketing to these programmers
specifically -- that is, telling everyone that while D is for
everyone, it is especially designed to give talented and
experienced programmers the tools they need to get their work
done -- even if you repel several programmers from, say, the
45th percentile or below in exchange for the brand loyalty of
one from 92nd percentile or above, it's probably a winning
strategy, because that one good programmer will get more done
than all the rest combined.
Isn't that implicitly what D is (and it is a compliment that
you do a good job of unfolding it). I agree with the economic
understanding, and with the strategy.
Yep, this is what I meant by my Blackberry analogy earlier in
this thread. Blackberry used to own the smartphone market,
when it was limited to professionals who emailed and texted a
lot. When the market broadened to include everyone, they
decided to go the popular route and sell touch-screen phones
without physical keyboards like everyone else. It was a
disaster, from which they're only recently recovering by
offering physical keyboards again. I'm not saying it _had_ to
fail, only that RIM clearly didn't have what it took to
succeed there.
Similarly, D's never going to do very well with programmers
who don't care about the efficiency of their code: simpler,
slower languages like python or ruby have that niche sewn up.
The best we can do is point out that if you're already here
for the advanced features, it can also be used for scripting
and the like. And of course, we should always strive to make
things as easy as we can for both small and large projects,
including better documentation.
One day, the tide may turn towards native efficiency again,
say because of mobile or more people writing code that runs on
large server clusters, and D will be well-positioned to
benefit if and when that happens.
The future is here already, but just not evenly distributed
(Gibson). It hit Andrei's employer early, but I am not sure
Facebook is an edge case of no relevance to mortals.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/165331-intels-former-chief-architect-moores-law-will-be-dead-within-a-decade
Data sets are exploding in size but the marginal dollar value
commercially of every byte is collapsing
whilst the free lunch from Moore's Law is over. That means you
have to use a JIT or native code, and the latter is not going
to be C++, Go, or Rust for uses within the enterprise that
require rapid prototyping and iteration to help answer dynamic
commercial questions.
Hence why both Java and .NET are getting full AOT compilation to
native code on their canonical toolchains in Java 9/10 and .NET
4.6.
--
Paulo
