Vision 2016 H1

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 26 January 2016 at 14:35:53 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Tuesday, 26 January 2016 at 14:24:57 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 26 January 2016 at 07:18:43 UTC, Ola Fosheim 
>> Grøstad wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, 26 January 2016 at 04:57:11 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>>> It is amazing that D has gotten so far as an OSS project 
>>>> without commercial backing, a credit to the engineering 
>>>> sense of Walter and the core team.  But I don't think you 
>>>> can organize your way around that fundamental obstacle.
>>>
>>> I don't think that is accurate at all.
>>
>> Which part?  There's at least three statements there, one 
>> largely factual, one opinion, then a prediction.  It's unclear 
>> what you think is inaccurate, since you don't say.
>
> I don't think OSS needs commercial backing to reach high 
> technical levels. I do think that many OSS projects spend too 
> little time on design and process, and well, design and 
> coordination is more challenging when you aren't co-located in 
> the same place.  I also think that often implementors take 
> leading roles in OSS, when that role should have been taken by 
> a designer/coordinator that would spend more time on 
> leadership. If you spend 10% leading and 90% coding then the 
> leading part suffers...

OK, I finally know what you disagree with.  The fundamental 
problem is that without commercial funding, all OSS contributions 
are voluntary, usually done during their spare time, while 
focused design takes time, a lot of it.  Without commercial 
backing to fund that time, it is difficult for most to work 
towards that high level of technical design.  Perhaps that's why 
OSS devs spend most of their time coding, they want to focus what 
little time they have on getting some code out.

Now, every once in a while, some lone coder like Walter has the 
time to buck those odds.  But then the problem becomes scaling 
the OSS project, especially without a commercial model.  We're 
lucky that Walter and Andrei are financially independent enough 
to work on D full-time, but that's still only two people.  D 
certainly is going a lot slower than it would with commercial 
backing.

Now, corporate support is no panacea, it has its own pitfalls.  
And maybe if someone stuck a whole bunch of money behind D, 
Walter and Andrei wouldn't even know how to spend all of it well, 
ie torrid growth simply may not be possible at this point in the 
language growth curve.  But I think D would certainly have grown 
faster to this point if it had a commercial model, and that such 
funding generally allows time for the design and coordination you 
say most OSS projects don't do.

> But there are tools we can use, if the issue was recognized.

Such as?

>> I wouldn't say D has pushed the difficult parts, and often
>
> Memory management. Performant garbage collection. Coherent 
> semantics.

It doesn't sound like Walter has much interest in the first two, 
and either nobody has picked those up or bothered to integrate 
PRs like Sociomantic's concurrent GC from D1.  As for the last, 
I'm sure he either disagrees or doesn't care.

>> implementing takes a lot of work too.  Obviously, the design 
>> is usually more important in the long-term, but the design "on 
>> paper" won't matter if nobody wants to implement it.
>
> They probably would if there was consensus behind it, it was 
> solid, important and had a seal of approval.

I don't think consensus has been the issue as much as time, which 
is the killer for any OSS or voluntary project.