Direction of D

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 3 January 2017 at 09:28:06 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>
> Allow me just to share a worthless outsider opinion.
>
> I never contributed anything worthwhile and decided it was 
> better to just focus on JVM, .NET languages., alongside C++, as 
> those are the skills I get paid for, thus stop polluting D 
> forums.
>
> Looking from the outside, and watching what was reached from 
> 2016 roadmap, it is clear the DIPs evaluated thus dar aren't 
> about fixing the library or runtime issues that prevent D's 
> adoption at large as a systems programming language.

Without listing what you think those real issues are, such a 
pronouncement is useless.

> Meanwhile Swift, Go and Rust have a clear roadmap how their 
> future is supposed to look like, and drive just in that 
> direction, with C++ taking all remaining good D ideas.

Heading in the wrong direction at full speed ahead is worse than 
meandering along in no discernible direction, because worst case, 
you will likely be closer to the right direction after simply 
meandering.  In any case, you clearly think D headed in some good 
directions, or C++ would have nothing to copy. ;)

As for the other roadmaps, I see it for Rust and Swift

https://github.com/aturon/rfcs/blob/roadmap-2017/text/0000-roadmap-2017.md
https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution

but nothing for Go.  Do you mean these milestone lists with 
hundreds of PRs attached?

https://github.com/golang/go/milestones

Or is it somewhere else that google can't easily find it?  You 
could read the changelog for the dmd/phobos master branches and 
get the same result as that Go list.

Those languages are all backed by large tech companies and are 
driven by their company agendas.  As I've pointed out in this 
forum before, with some quotes from Linus 
(http://forum.dlang.org/post/dluoruxmwxnfjtyvmgbh@forum.dlang.org), directed development is good for niches, which is where all those languages are now (iOS, network services, Servo), but only general-purpose tech lasts in the medium- to long-term.

D may never gain the resources it needs to make it that long, but 
a community employing D in _no one direction_, as Linus says 
happened with linux, is more likely to make it general-purpose 
enough to survive.

> This DIP discussion and the latest ones about splitting the 
> runtime again, don't do anything to earn D any credibility it 
> might still have left.

I kind of agree that both are not that worthwhile, but without 
stating your reasons for thinking the discussion _alone_ hurts 
D's credibility, which I mostly disagree with as such discussion 
is a core part of the distributed OSS process, that opinion is 
again useless.