Walter's annoying habits (good habits)

[Waldemar]

> Nonetheless, there are people here that have made copious contributions to
> D.  Yes, Walter does own large entitlement to the work that has gone into
> the reference compiler and libraries, but that's mostly because he
> controls it and there's very little that people can do to make large
> contributions internally: they very likely would if they could.  Most
> contributions, therefore, are relegated to periphery tasks or identifying
> bugs (fixing them is not often accepted).  This has been the way Walter
> has preferred to run things, and for the most part people have accepted
> this.  Although every once in awhile flair-ups occur because members get
> frustrated when contributions are refused, rejected, forgotten, or ignored
> despite the same bugs being brought up repeatedly.  The reason for this is
> more often because Walter is already overloaded with work, and he cannot
> manage to review and implement all contribution.  This is not to say this
> Walter is absolutely horridly wrong in the way he runs things... it's more
> about posing the question on how efficiency might be improved concerning
> internal workload distribution and organization.  But repeatedly such
> suggestions have been rejected as infeasable (or simply ignored).


That's very informative and interesting.


>From a user point of view (i.e. somebody that does not contribute to D development
but is contemplating using the language), Walter's so called "annoying habits"
produced a pretty good product.  Therefore, I would call them good habits.  We
(ooops, here's the "we" but it is intended to mean "non specific future users of
D")  are getting a language that addresses many problems and shortcomings
encountered in existing tools, most prominently C/C++.  D is attractive in certain
applications.

Alas, the innerworkings of the team that produces D are of major interest to the
users. Basically, what's need is a product that may be called mainstream.  D has
advanced to the point where it is quite usable and the language design and
implementation issues are no longer the top concern.  The top concern is how
mainstream it is.  Of course, D is not mainstream yet.  That's OK.  The question
is what is the roadmap to becoming one.  In other words, how do the developers
intend to bring the language to the level where it is accepted on par with
C++/Python/PHP, etc, etc.

Continuing on Walter's good habits, I can see the improvement every year, and the
upcoming 1.0 is great news.  So far so good.  There is progress elsewhere as well.
    Good, good.