Is D right for me?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday 09 October 2010 12:44:37 Walter Bright wrote:
> Gour D. wrote:
> > Walter> Few things work better than customers letting a company know
> > Walter> they are interested in such-and-such a product.
> > Even a non-paying customer in the open-source world?
> 
> At least it shows interest. No emails tells the open source developer
> "nobody cares, so I'll just abandon it".

Yes, a lack of positive feedback can be frustrating even if you have the best 
code ever. And as much as the developers of QtD likely want to use it for their 
own stuff, it's likely not worth doing it just for themselves. It's just too much 
work.

Of course, projects like QtD suffer from the same sort of problem as a compiler 
does in that it's not necessarily very useful until it's complete. Lots of 
people may be interested in using QtD, but if it's not at least close to done, 
it's not going to be useable enough to use in any major project, so people won't 
use, they won't report bugs on it, and the won't give any kind of feedback on 
the project. So, the poor QtD people then have to get a _lot_ of code done 
before they see any kind of positive feedback from the community, and when they 
_do_ start getting feedback, much of it is likely to be negative because feature 
X hasn't been implemented yet or feature Y is buggy. A lot of people have given 
up on D for similar reasons. Hopefully enough of the problems that they were 
having with dmd get fixed soon enough that they're able to actually continue 
working on the project without getting too frustrated over it. QtD is a huge 
service to the D community.

- Jonathan M Davis