On Saturday, 17 March 2018 at 20:02:01 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
And yet in Paris lives a man, presumably a French citizen, who was working on a cryptocurrency scaling startup last dconf and that ended up being part of the path towards launching Bitcoin Cash. So some French citizens don't seem to mind taking risks or trying new things, and if there is a dampening of entrepreneurial spirits it might be the government and culture. That's just one example, but the outliers can often tell you more than those in the centre of the distribution.
Yes, the government and beaurocrats in the administration etc. more often than not dampen the entrepreneurial spirit in Europe. Then again, people prefer security over freedom, because it involves risk, this attitude in turn feeds the "riskophobic" nanny state which in turn feeds people's risk-aversion (hen or egg?) and so on till the whole thing collapses or people get sick and tired of it.
Things change slowly in the beginning. Top management aren't the ones to start doing something creative unless they are a highly unusual kind of firm. It's people who can decide or who don't need to ask anyone's permission that are the early adopters.
A common conversation when the top management is "confronted" with a new idea:
Manager: "Has anyone ever done that before?" Foot soldier: "Err, no. It's a new idea." Manager: "Then we won't do it either!"
Anyway I asked Walter about why so many Germans in the D community. No final answer. It's interesting that Walter is of German descent. A controversial topic, but in my experience what you are from shapes who you are, how you think and what you value.
And receptivity to a particular way of doing things isn't uniform across the world.
I agree. That's why I started this thread. I already suspected that Walter had German anscestors, but didn't dare to ask (you know how things are these days ;) And maybe herein lies part of the answer. Maybe that's why D is a mixture of pragmatism (Anglo-Saxon) and (sometimes obsessive) attention to detail (German). And maybe this tension between pragmatism and perfectionism attracts more and more programmers as it not only reflects the problems they encounter in their daily work, but opens up a whole new field of possibilities / opportunities both in terms of language development and problem solving.
Other things that have been said so far are very interesting, i.e. the recent developments that leave languages like D some space to breathe. I've noticed that it is increasingly harder for big corporations to force their technologies (i.e. languages) on programmers, for various reasons, one of which is the certainly the fact that many programmers and coders have become wary and / or tired of language hypes - and the bitter experience that you always end up in a cul-de-sac at whose end sits a stubborn committee that develops a given language along ideological lines and not according to what people need.
