The birth of Åkerön

H. S. Teoh hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx
Tue Jun 18 19:10:37 PDT 2013


On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 09:47:37PM -0400, Tyro[17] wrote:
[...]
> There are a couple observations that have remained constant over the
> past eleven years I've been lurking here in D land: 1) The
> documentation is seriously lacking 2) There are few tutorials (and
> those that exist suffer from code rot) 3) The language continues to
> evolve so people are unwilling to develop tools for it 4) Most
> projects that get started are quickly abandoned 5) People outside
> the community do not give it a fare shake 6) There is no IDE 7) No
> built in GUI library 8) Most people complain about what's not
> available instead of lending a hand to fix it.
[...]
> I'm not going to be like the people that fall under category 8. To
> me it's one of two simple choices, either I contribute or shut up.

+1! I've also noticed many of the above points of lack, though in my
case I had the benefit of being a programmer by trade, so they presented
far less an obstacle to me than they must have for you. Early on I also
decided that I refuse to be part of category 8 -- since I have (at least
some of!) the skills to improve the situation, I'd much rather do that
than to have my complaints fall on deaf ears.

My biggest regret is my lack of spare time to work on D... but with what
little time I do have, I've tried my best to contribute code and
documentation fixes. While I feel like I could be doing more, at least
I've done *something* about the situation, and I hope many others would
do the same. Many small contributions from a large number of people
ultimately would surpass a small number of big contributions from a
small group of core people.


[...]
> I have no problem with spreading the word and, in fact, have been
> doing it since I stumbled upon the language. But I want to do more.
> I want to code and actually help improve the language. In order for
> that to happen though I need situations 1 or 2 to be improved. So I
> decided to launch dtutor.org.

A most admirable goal!


> But the decision was the easy part. I won't be finished with my
> current job until summer 2014 so I have very little time. I have
> very little programming experience, and thus would be at a lost to
> try to prepare content by myself. Though I've assembled, repaired
> and trouble shot computers issues for 20+ years, I've never ran a
> server before so that presents a challenge in itself. The technology
> I've decided to use to build the site is written in Python (of which
> I know nothing) which presents quite an obstacle to get it ported to
> D. I've never design or participate in the design of a website
> before so will have to learn that.

Actually, one very valuable role you could fill is that of a reviewer
for prospective tutorials. I find that many doc writers (and I include
myself in that category) have difficulty explaining things to total
newbies, because we're just already so familiar with everything that we
unconsciously make assumptions that newbies have no clue about. Having
somebody who isn't a D expert review the docs and tutorials would help
greatly in identifying areas that could use some clarification /
rewording to be more newbie-accessible.


> Yeah, its pretty clear that I have bitten off a lot more than I can
> chew... but to me it is better than complaining about the situation
> and not doing anything to help. The rest of the talk was about other
> areas of interest I have including Natural Language Processing and
> Logistics Management Systems. In the big scheme of things they are
> significant for my future business goals but not so much for D.
> Though I do hope to be the proud employer of D programmers in the
> future.

If I could find a D programming job, it would be a dream come true!!


> My hope is that I can obtain some help in bringing dtutor.org to
> life so that people like me can have a resource to turn to when they
> need guidance and the nay-Sayers will have one less thing to talk
> about.
[...]

+1.


T

-- 
Today's society is one of specialization: as you grow, you learn more and more about less and less. Eventually, you know everything about nothing.


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