On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 at 12:19:48 UTC, Russel Winder
wrote:
Having active regional groups is a first important factor, and
that is happening, though perhaps less than would be good.
Having lots of projects on GitHub (and BitBucket) that get
noticed. Clearly everyone is fighting JavaScript, but that is
not an issue for D per se. Go, Rust, C++, C are the "enemy".
Maybe discuss this a bit at the coming London D Meeting – which
sadly clashes with the London Go Meeting…
Nobody uses a language because the language is good, they use it
for what they can get done with it.
If someone wants to write a web app, they can look at vibe.d, but
they will find documentation written for experts. I was
thoroughly confused when I tried to read it (probably because
I've only done a limited amount of web programming) but I wrote a
minimal, working PHP app in 30 minutes.
If someone wants to write a GUI app, they can look at gtkd, but
I'm not sure how many will stick around when they click on the
documentation link and encounter this:
http://api.gtkd.org/src/gtk/AboutDialog.html
Someone wanting to do scientific programming is going to have to
reinvent the wheel. Hopefully that will change, but it's the
current state of affairs. I can even point to my own project to
embed D in R, a project that works but that I wouldn't recommend,
because it's neither properly documented or finished.
I'm sure others could add to the list. Once these things are
under control, we can worry about marketing.
