D1 to be discontinued on December 31, 2012

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/15/11 3:50 PM, Bane wrote:
> Anyways, D "community" can't really speak its mind here. Here it is
> 5-10 regular users that are persistent enough to dig trough loads of
> mixed information, some important, most of it not, on this NG. Most
> users have no time to check this place every other day so they can
> say 'please, don't discontinue D1, I am using it' or anything like
> that when important matter arises.
>
> Sending question to users is more correct way to obtain opinions than
> to wait people to stumble on this thread here. It won't happen for
> most D users. Ever.

This is the case with all language communities I've interacted with 
(C++, Perl, TeX). For all its hoards of users, C++ has a small but 
extremely influential community hanging out on two Usenet newsgroups: 
comp.lang.c++.moderated and comp.std.c++. Needless to say, both are free 
and open for anyone to join. But these groups are the closest it gets to 
pure meritocracy - people could earn huge amounts of clout simply by 
making good quality posts. In fact my first ever invited conference talk 
was solely on account of my newsgroup contributions.

The traffic on either of these groups is comparable to that on the D 
newsgroups. There are few official "well, let's ask the community" polls 
but by and large the trends reflected by these groups are fairly 
influential. I'm not saying that's good or bad, I'm just saying it is, 
and also that D's community dynamics is no different in that regard from 
at least a few others.

Regarding this particular announcement, there's no need to dig for it. I 
sent it not only to this group, but also to D_programming's 805 Twitter 
followers, my 1215 Twitter followers, my 3661 Facebook subscribers, 
reddit, and by extension to D's homepage and my own homepage. It is 
reasonable to expect that people with an interest in D have had all 
chances to see it and sufficient channels to chime in.

True, the announcement was a done deal and not a question. I very 
strongly think it didn't need to be a question, for reasons I expanded 
upon in other posts in this thread.


Thanks,

Andrei