Community Rant

Brad Roberts via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Wed Aug 23 16:27:22 PDT 2017



On 8/23/2017 3:58 PM, Mark via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Tuesday, 22 August 2017 at 15:14:33 UTC, Jonathan Shamir wrote:
>> [...]
>>
>> But lets be honest. If I was just interested to learn about this 
>> "modern system programming language" that is C++ done right, I would 
>> dismiss D very quickly. We need to get together as a community and 
>> rethink your priorities, because with problems like this we're making 
>> it very hard for newcomers to trust in this very poorly adapted language.
>>
>> Programming tools used by day to day programmers should be a priority. 
>> Because everyone expects valgrind to work.
>>
>> [...]
> 
> This kind of criticism comes up fairly often in the forums, maybe once 
> every few weeks. I can link to the recent threads on the matter, but I'm 
> sure you can make an educated guess about the responses therein. The 
> gist of it, in my view, is that:
> 
> "[Making] D more approachable and attractive to people thinking of 
> picking up the language."
> 
> just isn't a high priority right now.

That's one way to look at it.

Another, slightly more accurate and nuanced version is that there are 
many areas for improvement, and those that are doing work to improve 
things are doing them in areas they believe are important and useful for 
their work.  That there's not more in the area <X>, that you (and 
others) believe is important, merely shows that the number that believe 
<X> is important enough to work on right now is close to zero.  That 
doesn't mean that <X> isn't also important, just that it's not at the 
top of the priority list for those getting things done.

Convince someone that <X> is higher priority than the things they're 
working on then you might see some movement on those fronts.  Or 
convince yourself that it's important enough to engage in yourself. 
This isn't really a community level issue so much as a very personal 
level issue.  It's not sufficient for something to be declared a 
community level priority if no one at the personal level is interested 
enough to contribute their time.


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