Community Rant

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, August 23, 2017 16:27:22 Brad Roberts via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 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.

Well said.

- Jonathan M Davis