Lost a new commercial user this week :(

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 29 December 2014 at 16:19:35 UTC, Gary Willoughby 
wrote:
> On Monday, 29 December 2014 at 16:07:59 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> I strongly disagree.  Dicebot's post is completely true, 
>> describing exactly how open source projects actually work,
>
> No Dicebot described how open source projects *start*, big 
> difference.
>
> I don't want to get into a massive argument here, but viewing 
> users as an inconvenience when developing a project that is (in 
> it's very essence) supposed to be used by them, is a self 
> defeating attitude and will ultimately lead to no-one using it.

That is a nice platitude, and one that I actually agreed with 
above and in general, but who is actually going to do the 
painstaking work that Windows tooling would require?  That is 
what Dicebot is getting at.

If anybody cared about good Windows debugging support or getting 
vibe.d working flawlessly on Windows, they'd have done it 
already.  Now, Manu might bring more attention to those issues 
through his post and someone may decide to work on them as a 
result- it has already spurred Walter to try and improve the 
phobos docs- which is why I have no problem with his criticism.

But Dicebot is right that "users" are not the concern of those 
outside a small core who contribute to D.  Most contributors are 
just scratching their own itch, and users are just potential 
suckers who might add other features I want. ;)

Also, even companies have to prioritize: they cannot just do 
whatever the user asks for.  Open source projects, which are 
usually much more resource-constrained, have to prioritize much 
more.  The features Manu asks for have not been deemed 
priorities.  The open source advantage is that the developer pool 
is potentially much wider, so someone out there may want the same 
features Manu wants and be willing to implement them.