On Tuesday, 30 May 2017 at 01:46:02 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with RW's post. My reading is that the goal would be to get D into the enterprise, but maybe I misinterpreted. If D as a successor to Vala leads to more projects like Tilix, that's great.
I never quite understood the enterprise-focus either. What I like to see for a language is a difficult use scenario being maintainable. I sometimes browse large code bases just to see if a language leads to readable code.
writing better documentation for Dub, and so on. Incremental improvements lead to incremental adoption of D.
Yes, I think retention is the most important factor in the case of D. Identify and understand why polyglot programmers either stay with D or leave. Then give those areas the highest priority, especially exit-triggering issues.
Focusing on getting many libraries won't work, because you need to maintain them. I never use unmaintained libraries... Having many unmaintained libraries is in a way worse than having a few long-running ones that improve at a steady pace.
I'll also note that Vala didn't catch on, so being the successor to Vala by itself may not help D adoption.
Being perceived as the best for something helps. Vala was the best for something narrow. I think Rust is being perceived as the best for runtime-less programming with high level features (right or wrong) and Go is perceived as having a runtime for web services.
So I personally perceive Rust and Go in different sectors of the spectrum. I have more problems placing Nim, Haxe, D etc.
