On Wednesday, 3 January 2018 at 12:15:13 UTC, Pjotr Prins wrote:
they come if they need it. I remember a Google engineer telling
me that he was tired of people bringing up D every time. That
was 10 years ago. D has had every chance to become a hype ;)
There was a lot of hype around D about 10 years ago, because of
slashdot? (slashdot doesn't seem to work as a hub in that way
anymore?) Geeky people had even heard about it in job interviews…
But the compiler was a bit too buggy for production use and the
GC was… a problem for what it was position itself as: a
replacement for C++.
There are other languages that also position themselves as C++
replacements, such as http://loci-lang.org/ , but very few have
heard of those. So yeah D has enjoyed more hype than most
languages in this domain, actually.
why. What is it that makes a hyped language?
Well, depends on the hype, I guess. But you probably need some
kind of "prophetic" message that will "remove all pain". Since
C++98 was not painless, there was a market for a "prophetic
message". Much less so now. Also you need a "tower for
announcing" like Slashdot. I don't think reddit is anywhere near
as effective as Slashdot used to be. Too fragmented.
Rust received hype because it would make writing fast programs
"painless", just wait, it isn't quite ready yet, but we'll get
there. So they hype prophecies were there before Rust was
actually useful.
I don't think Go was all that hyped up. It received a lot of
attention at first release, but was underwhelming in terms of
features. But it received a lot of attention when being used for
containers, I believe. So more a niche utility marketing effect
in terms of buzz.
So hype seems to come with a language being used for some new way
of doing something (even though the language might not be
significant in that regard, e.g. Go). Or the hype seems to come
before the product is actually useful, not quite like a pyramid
scheme, but close… Oh yeah, bitcoin too. Prophetic, but not
particularly useful… yet, but just wait and see.
So I guess hype comes from:
1. People having an emotional desire to be free from something.
2. A tech delivering some kind of prophetic message one can
imagine will provide some kind of catharsis if one just believe
in the outcome.
Then you have this all the psychological effect that if people
have invested significant time, resources and/or emotion into
something then they will defend it and refuse to see flaws even
when faced with massive evidence against it. So the hype will be
sustained by a vocal set of believers if you have reached a
large enough audience with your messaging before the product is
launched…?
Then it tapers off in a long tail… or the believers will make it
work somehow, at least good enough to not be a lot worse than the
alternatives.
docs. I just disagree with the aim of trying to make D a hyped
language.
Yes, that is a bit late, I think. You would have to launch D3 or
something to get a hype effect (at least in the west).
A language like GNU Guile has only a few developers - and they
do great work.
But is Guile used much outside GNU affiliated projects?
