On Monday, 7 May 2018 at 10:27:32 UTC, Joakim wrote:
On Saturday, 5 May 2018 at 04:59:58 UTC, germandiago wrote:
On Tuesday, 1 May 2018 at 12:26:25 UTC, Joakim wrote:
[...]
My 2 cents. I have been following D for a long time and
started using it in a very small project. I am a very long
term C++ user.
[...]
Interesting analysis. These are pretty much the points of
technical and marketing emphasis today, so it appears the
current message resonated with you.
However, I was talking about more from the point of which
markets D would target first, ie the types of end users who'd
use D, whether game programmers or compiled GUI apps. So far
D's gained some traction at startups that need performance.
One issue with the current approach is that they seem to
implicitly assume that D needs to match or surpass C and C++.
Can't disagree with the betterC approach as that's really
needed, but I'm not sure if D should want to be a better C++.
Certainly app devs don't really care about @nogc and the
current systems programming emphasis aimed at C++ devs like you.
My point is that whatever that strategy is should be clearly
articulated, or you may even undermine yourself by not thinking
through carefully what your goals are.
Great marketing beats great tech (sadly), but we are creatures
subject to social influence and that which is shiny.
Who actually runs marketing for Dlang? Is it the foundation,
collective cooperation, or ? Does Dlang have what it needs to be
successful in this category in terms of financial resources,
expertise, and focus?
As an aside, this was the original marketing for Node.js, in the
years before it was acquired by Joyent: http://tinyclouds.org/ .
In a single year, it caught fire (that is, it became wildly
successful) because it had a strong BDFL (who was not a dictator,
and who stepped down as soon as it made sense to do so, and he
took on some messianic stature as a result), strong technical
merits, a clear focused message of where it fit in the market,
and it met a need. In fact, it met many more needs than
intended, widely used in both cloud and embedded type
applications. 8 years on from moving the project into the hands
of a corporate sponsor, through much controversy over governance
and some community strife, forks, etc., it's doing well in the
hands of a foundation: https://foundation.nodejs.org/ .
From a market focused perspective there is the technology itself
in one bucket, and then there is the adoption by enterprise.
Certain things have to happen for enterprise adoption to actually
take place. If we follow the pattern of what happened for Go or
Node.js, we can boil those down to execution of certain tangibles:
- Project is well documented
- Project is available under favorable OSS license (I won't get
into what favorable means, but for corporations, they have their
preferences)
- Project has a good toolchain and tools support
- Project has a good IDE integration
- Project has good sample applications built, lots of good
examples
- Project has a strong and active community of developers with
the appropriate mix of core contributors, external contributors,
experts, casual users, and people evaluating possible use
- Project has strong technical merits
- Project has strong market differentiators (this may require
real marketing to get this down on paper and promote this)
- Project has commercial support available (training, bug fixing,
development)
- Project has an academic community (this often helps seed use in
Universities), and students eventually grow up to work for
enterprise corporations
- Project has corporate sponsors (or foundation sponsors ... they
are really representing corporations)
- Project has a sustainable model (legal, financial) to maintain
its community, engineering, and marketing.
- Project has multiple big projects that rely upon it
Grade Go, Rust, and Node.js on this list above. Where are they
at on each item? Grade Dlang on this. We still have some work
to do. What companies offer commercial support in D? Are there
any Dlang focused agencies out there? How many projects are
using Dlang commercially? Who are the corporate sponsors of
Dlang? Again, I think much of this comes back to that marketing
message. What is the unique selling proposition. Define that.
Then conquer the world.
