Opinion of February 2012

[James Miller]

>> However, there's no documentation
>
>We should have this, but like everything else, it requires somebody take the
>time to do it.

So true, I spent literally 5 hours writing documentation for a project
I was releasing. It wasn't even that big. And I didn't write any
reference documentation. I maybe could have done it faster, cut it
down to 3-3.5 hrs, but it takes so long to do properly.

Not only do you need reference materials, you need example usage,
explanations of what to use when (and ideally why). Each example needs
to be tested, made sure that it is concise without being opaque and
documented itself. You paradoxically need somebody who knows exactly
what the code does, but knows what is unobvious and what is "advanced
use" only.

> I like the D language. Not so much the projects that surround D.

Same, having essentially 2 incompatible languages and 2 incompatible
"standard" libraries has been devastating. My personal opinion is that
Phobos, being maintained by the creators of the language, should be
the defacto library and everybody should be encouraged to use it for
most purposes. Tango shouldn't be a replacement for Phobos but work
alongside it, (a goal that the Tango-D2 team seem to be aiming for)
because having to change libraries to compile different programs is a
nightmare. And all new development should be in D2, no point sticking
to D1 now that support has been officially dropped.

So many projects simply don't work. Some have had underlying libraries
do breaking changes from under them, others rely on Tango D1 which
makes trying to port them to D2 effectively impossible (though it
should be easier now that most of Tango-D2 is done), and some haven't
had any development for years and just aren't useful.

The community needs some organisation. Currently DSource is not
actually that useful, Trac is all about SVN, but D and most other
libraries use git/GitHub which makes for a clunky experience. If
D-Programming-Language.org had a projects section, it would make it
much easier to manage and make more sense, there is no direct link
from the official website to any centralized project repository, which
makes discovery a nightmare. Many people do not want to join a mailing
list or ask in IRC just to find if a library or program exists.

--
James Miller