A New Era for the D Community

[monkyyy]

On Tuesday, 9 May 2023 at 12:27:30 UTC, FeepingCreature wrote:
> To be honest, this has always been my take as well.


On Tuesday, 9 May 2023 at 15:46:12 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
> I basically agree with this

I feel if I was understood, only people with (at least) one foot 
out the door would agree easily.

As it stands *anytime* *anyone* says "I want to help D" in the 
discord, I and several others basically go out of our way to 
dissuade that notion; *that's damning* to the long-term health of 
the language. Thats not changing on my end, Im practicing what I 
preach, minor political changes won't convince me. Can anyone 
tell me with a straight face that the last guy to say "Hi im new, 
d lacks a crypto lib in the std, is that something I could help 
with?" shouldn't have been told to avoid that like the plague?

---

Michael Malice has this concept of "Nancy Pelosi 4th favorite ice 
cream"; every night she has a pint of icecream, 90% of the time 
she picks her favorite and so on.

She hasn't eaten her 4th favorite icecream in 3 years, is she 
lying?

(nancy says she is for freedom, but when asked if she would 
legalize meth/ legalize nukes/ get rid of all taxes, *said no 
everytime*)

I think this leads to a "blunt fact" you can only have so many 
principles. Every official D codebase uses the official style 
guide, cares about the long-term vision, and who knows what other 
unstated requirements.

I believe "coherent vision" must be discarded for some part of 
the process.

> "Management" does not always mean "telling people what to do". 
> Sometimes (often!) it means removing roadblocks and bottlenecks 
> that get in the way of people doing what they already want to 
> do.

The way I read the main post is not "We are changing our 
fundamental values to be more flexible" it's more "I'm making an 
effort to communicate the team's vision better". I don't believe 
this issue is that; I hear the team's vision very very loudly, I 
could tell you a few reasons why the std won't get new data 
structures this decade(much less the ones I would suggest). It's 
not a lack of communication of them to me, Im just willing to 
summarize "we can't make data structures, you should use @nogc 
@live and @safe, your code isn't our style, allocators are 
coming" to "no".

D seems to plan on telling people what's acceptable at exactly 
the same rate, for the foreseeable future; I see nothing that 
would make anything I write acceptable to it.

> (Honestly, maybe 80% of the time when I've seen "D needs better 
> management", it has been code for "D management didn't like my 
> proposal.")

Yes, d needs better management because d didn't like my proposal.

I mean "anarchic" when I ask for a redesign of std.experimental. 
I don't see a future healthy growth of the language when any 
member of the dev team has a say on everything.

I see no shuffling of decision-making capabilities that would 
resolve the issues.

---

When I say "d has a community of meta-programming crazed 
iconoclasts" and "don't herd cats"; I do mean the community, 
genius doesn't necessarily play nice with others or lead people 
to work *for free* with poor working conditions. I'm not really 
saying nice things about myself or the other people who left or 
are unwilling to contribute for whatever reason. But I would 
suggest the solution to courting the iconoclastic elements isn't 
with something tested in corporate culture, corporations 
generally pay to have people tolerate their demands, D must 
compete with the freedom of doing your own project.