D needs to get its shit together!

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Fri, 2017-06-16 at 15:08 +0000, Guillaume Piolat via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
> On Friday, 16 June 2017 at 03:53:18 UTC, Mike B Johnson wrote:
> > D needs to just work!
> 
> 
> I think that D is quickly gaining increasingly picky and 
> demanding users because it's breaking out in the general 
> programmer population.
> 
> Not all of these programmers have used C++ and perhaps have 
> higher expectations when it comes to "just work".
> 
> If you look at the complaints from 8 years ago (where 
> ragequitting D was more common), everyone of their points have be 
> adressed, and most things have improved.
> 
> Perhaps complaints are poised to get higher in intensity 
> precisely because things have become better ;)
> 

The corollary is that The D Foundation has to make sure the D
experience (DMD, RDMD, LDC, LDMD, GDC, GDMD, Dub, etc.) works out of
the box, either with a downloader or a Chocolatey package on Windows;
downloader, MacPorts and Homebrew on MacOS, and packaging for Debian,
Fedora, Arch, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc.

Most of it is there, but it isn't as slick an experience as say Rust
and Go. It about being a good and proactive downstream for all the
packaging systems (which is mostly there) and having good installers
where needed, mostly there. I suspect a big part of the difficulty is
resources, but it is also having three tool chains. Clearly Rust and Go
have people paid (directly or indirectly) to deal with front of house,
customer facing stuff. D has some volunteers most of whom are back
office, just want to get on with code please type people.

If it is true that there is increased traction for D, then getting some
resource into the front of house stuff will be critical to that
traction fading and disappearing.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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