Re: D on Tiobe Index
On Thursday, 31 August 2017 at 16:37:35 UTC, SrMordred wrote: On Thursday, 31 August 2017 at 14:57:28 UTC, bitwise wrote: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/d/ What happened in 2009? My guess is constant random methodology changes. I was tracking TIOBE index each month from 2011 till 2016. I remember they announced changes in methodology in title page approximately once per 3-4 months. For example, changing the base from 100% to sum of percentages of all languages(<100%) increased reported % of each language. Taking this into account means that changes in particular month tells nothing. The trend is, however, positive: in 2014-2017 years D stands higher than in 2011-2014 (if you have faith in TIOBE averages). I see sometimes positive discussions about D at completely unexpected local tech sites. Although D's position becomes higher in TIOBE, I don't see progress in other statistics, for example in github.
Re: GitHub could be acquired by Microsoft
On Monday, 4 June 2018 at 19:26:23 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Monday, 4 June 2018 at 19:06:52 UTC, Maksim Fomin wrote: Unlikely, you don't spend $7.5 billion on a company because you want to send a message that you're a good dev tools company, then neglect it. You have no idea about how big corporations' management spends money. As with Nokia and Skype - I don't know whether it was initially a plan to destroy products or management was just silly. I suggest you look at their online slides linked from the Nadella blog post to see their stated plan, such as integrating github into VS Code more: http://aka.ms/ms06042018 and likely vastly overpaid for an unprofitable company in the first place :) this is exactly how such deals are done - paying $7.5 bl. for nonprofitable company. Unfortunately, their books are unavailable because they are private company, but scarce information in the web suggests that in most of their years they have losses. Just as rough estimate: to support $7.5 bl valuation Microsoft must turn -$30 ml. net loss company into business generating around $750 ml. for many years. There is no way to get these money from the market. Alternatively, the project can have payoff if something is broken and Microsoft cash flows increase by $750 ml. This is more likely... but they emphasize that they intend to keep github open and independent. They can claim anything which suits best their interests right now. Or, as alternative, github can be broken in a such way, that their promises on surface are kept. Business is badly compatible with opensource by design.
Re: GitHub could be acquired by Microsoft
On Monday, 4 June 2018 at 08:42:08 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: On 6/3/2018 8:51 PM, Anton Fediushin wrote: This is still just a rumour, we'll know the truth on Monday (which is today). We'll stay on Github as long as it continues to serve our interests, which it has done very well, and I have no reason to believe will change. We have a number of ties to Microsoft: 1. It's just down the street. 2. Many D users work at Microsoft. 3. Microsoft has always been helpful and supportive of Digital Mars, note the files licensed from Microsoft in the distribution. 4. Microsoft has invited myself and Andrei to speak at Microsoft from time to time. 5. Microsoft hosts the nwcpp.org meetings, which provide a venue for me to try out D presentations to a friendly crowd. 6. Microsoft has been generous with helping me solve some vexing compatibility problems from time to time. OK, so Digital Mars is in good relationship with Microsoft (I am surprised because have never heard about it). However, judging by Microsoft acqusition experience my prediction is that github will slowly but surely degradate (as suggested on some forums, everything will be firstly switched to Microsoft account - to track data, then everything will be mangled by ads, then some features deemed unnecessary by Microsoft will be removed, then linux will be badly supoorted, then some features incompatible with Microsoft services will stop working, then servers will start work poorly like skype...). P.S. My second reaction after reading news (after shock) was to visit D forum.
Re: I have a plan.. I really DO
On Friday, 29 June 2018 at 07:03:52 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky wrote: I never ever (I think) did something provocative, something to finally see: ... My 5 cents inspired by experimenting with D some years ago. 1. Programming became niche oriented and quite diverse. Writing new language requires significant manpower. 2. D manpower is not sufficient for finishing language in low level niche. AFAIK Walter estimated manpower around 2013 to be equivalent of bus factor of 10. This is not enough to deliver stable language, it will always be "tasted as raw" comparing with c++. 3. D strategic mistake is ad-hoc design. Some features are added or extended and because of complexity result in corner cases (this is exacerbated because sometimes backward compatibility is preserved and sometimes not). Fixing corner cases sometimes produces more questions. As a result language has some mess which is unlikely to be fixed coherently (c++ is at least a documented mess). 4a. Limited developers' efforts are consumed by fixes and internal code optimization rather than important issues. 4b. Dips (related to language design) mostly fail because proposal authors do not write code and developers are busy. 5. My view of D future. Walter and developers will continue to improve and develop D but at low pace. Low-level niche will be dominated by c++ as a common denominator. D and some alternative languages would compete for different parts of this niche. In long-term low-level niche will be broken into smaller niches with languages specializing in them. Being "just low level" would be wrong as "just language". This would raise questions what D goal is. I am from area of economic, financial and scientific calculations used in decision making. It is dominated by python, c++ and statistical software. In most cases it does not require absolute speed (except financial markets rt trading, big data processing or some hard mathematical problems which are relevant for researchers in top institutions with supercomputers). It is hard for me to provide arguments for using D (meaning from professional area view) because c++ can be used for performance and D is poor in statistical libraries. Because it is applied area nobody cares whether exceptions have root class or whether virtual is default.
