On 9/3/2018 7:19 PM, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
The way for D to appeal to more people is not to address
the complaints of those who spend more time writing on the forum grumbling but
don't use it much, because in my experience you do much better appealing to the
people who are your best customers than to those who tell you if only you could
do X there would be huge demand. I think that has been Walter's experience too.
I've bin in this business a long time. Fun anecdotes:
---
I was out jogging with a colleague in the 1990's one day. He said what the world
really needs, and what he really needed, was a Java implementation that
generated native code. It would set the world on fire!
I told him I wrote one, he could get it today from Symantec. He never said
another word on the subject. It turns out nobody wanted a native Java compiler.
---
Back in the old Datalight days in the 1980s, a big customer said they couldn't
use Datalight C because it didn't have Feature X. If only it had X, they'd place
a Big Order. So I implemented X, and excitedly showed it to them and asked for
the Big Order. They hemmed and hawed, then said what they really needed was
Feature Y!
After that, I was a lot less credulous of dangling promises of a Big Order. I'd
often say sure, and ask for an advance on the order, which worked well at
filtering out the chain-jerking.
---
Related to me by a friend: X told me that what he really wanted in a C++
compiler was compile speed. It was the most important feature. He went on and on
about it. I laughed and said that compile speed was at the bottom of his list.
He looked perplexed, and asked how could I say that? I told him that he was
using Cfront, a translator, with Microsoft C as the backend, a combination that
compiled 4 times slower than Zortech C++, and didn't have critical (for DOS)
features like near/far pointers. What he really regarded as the most important
feature was being a name brand.
---
Henry Ford said that his market research suggested that people wanted a faster
horse.
---
Trying to figure out where we should allocate our scarce resources is probably
the most difficult task I face. I know it looks easy, but it is all too easy to
wind up with a faster horse when everyone else developed a car.
