Why not promoting team work?

rikki cattermole via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Tue Jan 17 04:45:09 PST 2017


On 18/01/2017 12:38 AM, strymon wrote:
> On Saturday, 14 January 2017 at 02:28:34 UTC, nbro wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>> I've been following D for at least one year. I like it and I think
>> it's a very good programming language, even though I do not agree with
>> everything it's being done.
>>
>> One thing that has saddened me is seeing a lot of D's users trying to
>> implement their own library or maybe trying to implement multiple
>> libraries at the same time. Most of the results are very poor because
>> libraries are not
>>
>> 1. completed
>> 2. maintained
>> 3. well-written
>>
>> I've seen comments like "I'm no more maintaining this library because
>> I'm not able to proceed since I do not have the skills". This of
>> course doesn't bring any credibility to the language, to the
>> community, etc. So we see some people trying bring the caravan
>> forward, but I many of these people are not qualified enough clearly,
>> since they do not even have the vision and the knowledge that starting
>> a project like creating a serious GUI or modern IDE is not an easy
>> task, and definitely it won't be a person alone that will create one a
>> decent amount of years that will compete with the most performant ones.
>>
>> My idea (which is mostly directed to the big names behind D) is that
>> team work should somehow be promoted.
>>
>> How could you do such a thing?
>>
>> One possibility could be to announce interesting and useful projects
>> in D and somehow ask for people interesting in working in such
>> projects. These people should clearly be qualified for the job, but
>> this isn't an easy task to verified. The projects could eventually or
>> not be backed up by the announcer of the project.
>>
>> These could be a few starting ideas and options.
>
> Coincidentally I have been stalking the D community for about a year
> too. I think I think I get what @nbro is trying to say - at least as far
> as the D libraries are concerned. I am not a computer scientist, my
> background is statistics and I have tried ALOT of programming languages
> and I think D is head and shoulders above them all (at least the ones
> I've tried).
>
> As far as the core D language and standard libraries are concerned I
> think they are pretty well looked after probably since their priority is
> very high. The debates in the forum are also (or mostly) a good thing I
> think - as long as they remain constructive.
>
> Funnily enough I think Dub is fine (at least for my meagre
> requirements), but the available libraries are quite woeful - and I
> don't like saying this since I like D so much, it's also depressing
> since I think that D is probably the best programming language in the
> world. However, I think that D attracts highly driven and talented
> people who also tend to be a little egomaniacal and territorial. There
> are probably some commercial considerations too. If you turn up asking
> about how to build a "doodad" and someone else is making money in D with
> that "doodad" or feels that the topic of that "doodad" is their personal
> territory, they may not want to join with you to work on it or want to
> help you with it. Help is given up to a point for some basics or if you
> discover a bug somewhere, but I see that things get territorial very
> quickly.
>
> On the other hand there are also projects that are so ambitious that
> they alienate people. For instance, there are very few programmer that
> understand how to build data structures, computer algorithms, scientific
> algorithms, have an awareness of how to code for cpus and understand the
> ieee context of creating algorithms. Then on top of that understand the
> specific library configuration and the best way to contribute to it. I'm
> not saying that people shouldn't have cool projects, but perhaps some
> projects are trying to do too many things at once or need a better way
> of organising themselves or need better documentation for contributors?
>
> The support for learning advanced D programming is also quite poor, so
> unless you come from a pretty good C++ background or have deep computer
> science knowledge, you will struggle. The material on compile time
> coding is woeful. The best source I have found is Philippe Sigaud's
> tutorial but it isn't exactly an industrial strength text on the
> subject. I think that Ali's Programming in D book is great, but after
> reading this, "beginners" need more if they are going to productive with
> D especially because of the dearth of quality libraries. The only other
> source of good practice advanced D coding is the Github standard library
> itself.
>
> Its probably a good idea to have a suggested reading list for new
> programmers that extend outside D at least until there are more suitable
> D resources. For instance:
>
> 1. A book on algorithms and data structures.
> 2. A book on compilers, language design.
> 3. ...

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