Rant after trying Rust a bit

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 27 July 2015 at 22:47:05 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> On Monday, 27 July 2015 at 21:54:23 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On Monday, 27 July 2015 at 20:49:54 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
>> wrote:
>>> I'll do my best to limit my participation in emotional 
>>> debates, and suggest other D luminaries to do the same.
>>
>> LOL. That's why I was originally planning to not say anything 
>> in this thread...
>>
>> - Jonathan M Davis
>
> Your comments were very clear and much appreciated, but I see 
> the point.

Well, I ended up commenting, because there were some very import 
points relevant to what we do with D that needed clarifying. What 
I wanted to avoid (and mostly did) was arguing over Rust vs D. 
For instance, I'd hate to lose the ternary operator in favor of 
the expression if-else blocks that were being suggested, but 
there's no point in arguing over it, because we're not going to 
lose the the ternary operator, and we're not going to make it so 
that if-else blocks can be used as expressions. Arguing about it 
at this point just creates contention. And it's far too easy to 
come at that sort of discussion from an emotional point of view 
that D is better because I really like it and am invested in it, 
and what's being suggested is alien to me or doesn't fit with my 
aesthetics or whatever. Sometimes what another language has _is_ 
better, but often, it's a trade-off or even completely 
subjective, and regardless, it generally isn't going to have any 
effect on D at this point. Rather, it's just going to make 
emotions flare. So, at this point, I'd prefer to generally avoid 
discussions of D vs any other language. I got into a really nasty 
argument about ranges vs iterators the other day on reddit, and I 
just don't want to be doing that sort of thing anymore.

However, what we _do_ stand to learn from is what's work welling 
for other languages (like Rust) in terms of process and the 
things that they do that don't necessarily have to do with the 
language itself which help them succeed, particularly, since even 
though we're generally pretty strong on the language front (not 
perfect, but we definitely have a very strong offering), we tend 
to have problems with marketing, getting folks to contribute, 
getting those contributions merged in in a timely manner, getting 
releases out, etc. We've definitely improved on that front, but 
it's probably our weakest point, whereas the language itself is 
pretty fantastic.

But I would like to avoid arguments over which language is better 
or which feature in which language is better or anything like 
that, particularly since we're unlikely to add anything to D at 
this point because of such discussions. Rather, we need to finish 
what we have and make it solid.

- Jonathan M Davis