On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 08:31:15 UTC, Dave Jones wrote: n production.
Im not trying to be negative but if Nim or Rust released a blog post saying "We made find faster" is it going to get you to try them out? Is it enough of an enticement to get over you preconceptions about those languages and to think maybe they are worth a try?
The majority of the page views on the blog overall come from reddit, twitter and (for the posts that are shared there) HN. That particular post generated a lot of feedback in the reddit comments, much of it positive. The same for Walter's BetterC posts. That sort of content is what people like to discuss, and when that discussion is positive it's a net win for D. Whether that specific post brought anyone in is irrelevant.It certainly influenced opinions about D to some degree.
Programming languages aren't impulse buys. When you read enough thoughtful articles about a language and see enough positive discussion about it, it will be more likely to come to mind later on down the road when you're looking for something new. I'm working on another project right now that I intend to use together with the blog to continue to build that sort of capital.
As for the content, separate that which I target toward the D community and that which I target outside the community. The former goes to /r/d_language and the latter to /r/programming. Invariably, the latter gets many more page views. How that translates into a conversion ratio in actually bringing people to give D a try I couldn't say. I only measure feedback in terms of page views and discussion.
I'm continually learning new things about the content, from little things about how seemingly innocuous lines can set off a massive negative thread in reddit to broader concepts about what kinds of content do well with the right taglines. That influences how I write my own posts, what sort of content I'm looking for at any given moment, and how I edit posts. I'm also always on the lookout for new ideas.
The type and quality of content is not a concern from my perspective. I've got a good handle on that. The bigger issue is quantity. I need more people submitting content. Period.
