dlang website design

[Wulfklaue via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 26 June 2017 at 05:10:34 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
> Anyway, it seems that not many people on this forum see any 
> interest in improving D's popularity on the web with just a few 
> cheap cosmetic changes to better align it with contenders like 
> Python or Go, so I will bothered people with unwanted advices.

Remove Python from your link:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=dlang,kotlin,golang

D does not even register beyond 1, even without python disrupting 
the whole scale line.

> Whoops, sorry, this is already done at the moment actually. Ok, 
> then I said nothing... LOL

I know how you feel but trust me that trying to fight this seems 
to be a fight you will not win.

If there is something very clear about the D community, its comes 
mostly down to this:

* If you want something done, do it yourself
* If you want something done, pay for it
* If its a massive obvious flaw, maybe somebody will fix it

D with some help can become a much more general accepted 
programming language that is not just a C++ replacement language. 
The D language as i stated before is not the problem. Its mostly 
what is around the language, is where D falls short.

But fixing those issues tend to be:

* Repetitive work, nobody like doing that
* None glorious work.

In other words, not a big project where somebody can put there 
own stamp upon it. This seems to be one of the major issues. A 
lot of brilliant people but very few that want to do the grunt 
work.

Frankly, there are moments that i wanted to do some of the grunt 
work but the same issue as everybody else. No time to spend hours 
and hours into fixing things ( and some of the issues that needs 
to be fixed can be weeks or months of work unfortunately ).

This is why i personally think the only way to "solve" these 
issues, is if D hires people that work full time on these issues. 
And that in return needs money.

And then we come back to the same sticky point. Why are very few 
people donating? Maybe its just from my perspective but when i 
donate, i want to feel that my money will be used good. And 
because there is no real public accounting on where the money 
that D gets is being spend, ... maybe there is but again, it 
feels like you need to dig to find it, like with most D things.

---

Saturday i spend some time with Kotlin. And frankly, i liked it 
more then i expected.

Install jetbrains community edition, install JVM. And your ready 
to rock.

* Front end writing / Javascript generation. Works out of the box.

* Java generation / writing. Fast, works perfectly.

* Great editor support! I just love the whole "rust" style 
mutable recognition build in. The extra type hinting. The ability 
to alter the coding formatting. Etc ... and all in the familiar 
editor then i am used to from my php days.

* Kotlin Native (llvm). A bit more work to get going but its only 
at 0.3 version so one gives it some slack. But they did 
impressive work in the last two months from the initial release. 
Hell, they even beat Swift by offering Windows support already 
*lol*

---

While i am sure there are javascript converting modules for D. 
Again ... no focus on it, 3th party, no clear information etc ...

When it comes down to editor support, sorry its mediocre at best. 
Here are work i am fighting the workspace-d dfmt simply because i 
have some long shell lines that i want on a single line. They are 
 > 120 characters but dfmt keeps breaking my line formatting. 
Frustrating because it looks bad and because dfmt is compiled 
into workspace-d, no documentation how to override dfmt. Again, 
it feel like a lot of modules slapped together and they work but 
no steps beyond this.

...

I am at work so i do not have a lot of time to write all this. D 
simply feels incomplete compared to its competitors. Not the 
language, that is great and really feature complete. But 
everything around it feels fragmented, incomplete, in a constant 
state of unfinished. That is just my opinion.