Re: D compilation is too slow and I am forking the compiler

2018-11-27 Thread Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d-announce

On 11/26/18 11:53 AM, Guillaume Piolat wrote:


How many times have you been in this conversation:

--

- What language are you using?
- D.
- I know next to nothing about D.
- Oh, it's very good, I even built a business on it! arguments and features>.
- Oh no thanks. I should try Rust, it's secure, fast, modern blah blah; 
facts don't matter to me. But in reality I won't even learn a new 
language, I'm happy with a language without multi-threading.


--

It happens to me ALL THE TIME.
This pattern is so predictable it's becoming boring so now I just keep 
silent.




That's no surprise. The modern tech world is absolutely flooded with 
imbeciles and fashion-driven people.


Using D for AWS Beanstalk applications (German)

2018-11-27 Thread Andre Pany via Digitalmars-d-announce

Hi,

Find here a short tutorial how you can directly execute D 
applications on AWS Beanstalk.


http://d-land.sepany.de/tutorials/cloud/native-aws-beanstalk-applikation/

Kind regards
Andre


Re: D compilation is too slow and I am forking the compiler

2018-11-27 Thread Guillaume Piolat via Digitalmars-d-announce

On Tuesday, 27 November 2018 at 14:19:12 UTC, Joakim wrote:
As Laeeth always says, you're best off looking for people 
who're actually capable and empowered to make such risky 
decisions, rather than aiming for the majority too early, 
because they only jump on board once the bandwagon is stuffed 
and rolling downhill.


I get the (I read "D compilation is slow" + "I'm not interested") 
vibe from people that actually _are_ early adopters, very 
interested in programming, who adopted Scala and Nim despite 
obvious risks.


I disagree with your opinion but just lacks the time to defend my 
own in a lengthy forum post. Let me make a giant argument by 
authority: I sell B2C software for a living. Convincing people to 
try software despite their will is what I do for a living. "Build 
it and they will come" would be a fantasy to believe if we hadn't 
competitors who had people come way before they built it.


Complicated triple negation arguments (D compile fast! no wait, 
it compiles slowly! no wait, it compiles fast!) don't work. In a 
few months whenever someone bring out D, forum replies will say 
"but D compilation is not that fast".




Re: D compilation is too slow and I am forking the compiler

2018-11-27 Thread Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce

On Monday, 26 November 2018 at 16:42:40 UTC, bachmeier wrote:

On Monday, 26 November 2018 at 16:21:39 UTC, Joakim wrote:

I agree that it was a risky title, as many who don't know D 
will simply see it and go, "Yet another slow compiler, eh, 
I'll pass" and not click on the link. Whereas others who have 
heard something of D will be intrigued, as they know it's 
already supposed to compile fast. And yet more others will 
click on it purely for the controversy, just to gawk at some 
technical bickering.


I don't actually think it was risky. What are the odds that 
someone was going to start using D for a major project but then 
changed her mind upon seeing a title on HN or Reddit? Probably 
very small that even one person did that.


Yes, but you're ignoring the much larger group I mentioned- those 
who only vaguely heard of D, if at all- and the negative title 
gives them a reason not to look into it further.


And then there is always the fact that there was a story on 
HN/Reddit about D. It's hard for publicity for a language like 
D to be bad when so few people use it.


The quote that "there's no such thing as bad publicity" comes 
from art and show business though, don't think it's true for tech 
and other markets. When your audience is looking for a tool and 
not entertainment, there's lots of ways for bad publicity to sink 
it.


Anyway, I noted in this case that the provocative title may 
actually have gotten more people to read a positive post, so the 
pros likely outweighed the cons. We can just never know how large 
the unclicked-on downside was: you can never measure how many 
people heard of but _didn't_ buy your book, because they didn't 
like the title or something else about its exterior.


On Monday, 26 November 2018 at 16:53:59 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
wrote:

On Monday, 26 November 2018 at 16:21:39 UTC, Joakim wrote:
In my opinion language adoption is a seduction/sales process 
very much like business-to-consumer is, the way I see it it's 
strikingly similar to marketing B2C apps, unless there will 
be no "impulse buy".


I find that hard to believe: we are talking about a technical 
tool here.


How many times have you been in this conversation:

--

- What language are you using?
- D.
- I know next to nothing about D.
- Oh, it's very good, I even built a business on it! list of arguments and features>.
- Oh no thanks. I should try Rust, it's secure, fast, modern 
blah blah; facts don't matter to me. But in reality I won't 
even learn a new language, I'm happy with a language without 
multi-threading.


--

It happens to me ALL THE TIME.
This pattern is so predictable it's becoming boring so now I 
just keep silent.


Never, I don't go around trying to convince people one-on-one to 
use D. I have given talks to groups introducing the language, 
that's how I go about it.



What happens? Rust / Go have outmarketed us with words.

The battle (of marketing) is on words not technical features, 
Rust happen to own "programming language" + "safety", what do 
we own? D is good in all kinds of directions and the marketing 
message is less simple.


The leaders choose to own the word "fast" (see our new motto 
"fast code, fast" which is very accurate) and it's important to 
get aligned.


I'll note that in your example they haven't actually learnt Rust 
either. I don't think marketing is that relevant for D at this 
stage, nor for Rust/Go either.


The way anything- tech, fashion, TV shows- becomes popular is 
that some early tastemaker decides that it's worth using or 
backing. Eventually, enough early adopters find value that it 
spreads out to the majority, who simply follow their lead.


Most people aren't early adopters of most things. They like to 
think they are, so they'll give you all kinds of 
rational-sounding reasons for why they don't like some new tech, 
but the real underlying thought process goes something like this, 
"I have no idea if this new tech will do well or not. I could 
take a risk on it but it's safer not to, so I will just wait and 
see if it gets popular, then follow the herd."


Very few will admit this though, hence the list of 
plausible-sounding reasons that don't actually make sense! ;)


As Laeeth always says, you're best off looking for people who're 
actually capable and empowered to make such risky decisions, 
rather than aiming for the majority too early, because they only 
jump on board once the bandwagon is stuffed and rolling downhill.


Also, regardless of how languages are chosen as they get into 
the majority, D is very much still in the 
innovators/early-adopters stage:


But the current state of D would very much accomodate the 
middle-of-the-curve adopters. The language rarely breaks stuff. 
People making money with it, making long-term bets.


Hell, I could make a laundry list of things that are better in 
D versus any alternatives! That doesn't bring users.


I'm not talking about the quality of