Broken?

[Joseph Cassman]

On Tuesday, 11 March 2014 at 17:47:56 UTC, Steve Teale wrote:
> What D needs at this point is a dictator. There are about 30 
> pages of discussion about Walter's std.array.front post, and 
> Steve S's counter post.
>
> It reminds me of the way it was maybe 4 years ago, when there 
> was so much bickering that I just gave up for some time, and 
> went away. Who is going to go through all that stuff, and 
> winnow a compromise out of it. Everyone has a job, or some 
> vital preoccupation with their own project.
>
> The buck has to stop somewhere - is it Walter, or Andrei, or 
> can any proposal or comment be stalled by sheer weight of 
> contrary views?
>
> This is probably a management issue, not a technical one. 
> Trouble is there's no manager, and even if their was, he'd have 
> no minions.
>
> What to do?
>
> Steve

I started trying to use D a few years ago and also had to take a 
long hiatus due to frustration with its quality of 
implementation. But having come back to it a little over a year 
ago I think it is now generally useable and ready for the final 
polishing effort needed to make it into a professional product. A 
lot of that success I feel is due to the good leadership of 
Walter and Andrei. Even though they are the "dictators" so to 
speak of the language, they are very open to discussion and have 
good taste when it comes to what to include in the language. I 
learn a lot from the forums and appreciate being able to discuss 
things with those involved in developing the language.

Still something needs to happen to get D to the next million 
people. The current grassroots structure has served D well. And I 
think its legacy should continue forward no matter what form D's 
development takes. But along with its current set of developers I 
think that D really needs some solid financial support. In 
particular, I think that there needs to be a good group of 
full-time developers on the payroll to kick its development into 
high gear. I have no ability to organize such an effort, pay for 
it, or even join as a developer. But whatever could be done to 
get funded development into action would be well worth it in my 
opinion. I fear that without such an organized effort the promise 
that D currently holds may fade into niche irrelevance as time 
passes on.

When I saw the talks scheduled for Dconf 2014 "Opening Keynote: 
State of the struct address" by Andrei and "Keynote: The Last 
Thing D Needs" by Scott Meyers I was hoping that perhaps this 
will be announced as something already in the works. Not sure 
what that conference will bring. But would be pretty cool if so.

Joseph