My first experience as a D Newbie

Ecstatic Coder ecstatic.coder at gmail.com
Thu Oct 19 17:13:01 UTC 2017


On Thursday, 19 October 2017 at 16:43:51 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 11:43:11AM +0000, jmh530 via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
>> In some sense, though, you can pick your battles. The longer 
>> you've been reading the forums, the better you may have a 
>> sense of it. When I first started reading them, I was gung-ho 
>> and excited about some debates, but now I'm just like meh. And 
>> I'm not even sure I've been on here two years. Find something 
>> you can contribute to, or start a new project, and work on 
>> that.
>
> +1.  I used to actively participate in forum debates.  
> Nowadays, meh. At the end of the day, what matters is whether 
> somebody picks up the baton and actually starts contributing.  
> So that's what I do these days. See something I don't like in 
> Phobos?  Fix it, submit a PR.  See a typo on the website?  Fix 
> it, submit a PR.  See something I don't know how to fix?  Dig 
> into the code, learn how to do it.  Maybe I'll discover I'm in 
> way over my head.  That's OK, I still learn something along the 
> way. Maybe next time I'll be knowledgeable enough to submit a 
> PR.
>
> Participating in a forum debate is the easiest thing to do, but 
> also the least productive, all things considered.  I can win 
> arguments, or lose arguments, but after all that is said and 
> done, what has changed in the codebase?  Nothing.  And what are 
> the chances of somebody else picking up the torch and carrying 
> it through?  Judging from our track record, practically nil.
>
> What does makes a change is when somebody writes the code. (And 
> by "code" here I include also things like HTML/CSS for the 
> website.)  A forum proposal, say a website change, would have 
> so much more weight if the person making the proposal has a PR 
> sitting in the queue that people can decide whether or not to 
> merge.  It sends the message that (1) the person cares enough 
> about the issue to actually invest the time and energy to 
> implement it (not just talk about it), and (2) the person is 
> personally committed to make it happen and see it through.  
> Also, (3) should the consensus turn out to be "yes let's do 
> it", it can be implemented right away, instead of a vacuous 
> "OK, we finally agreed to do this.  So who's gonna actually 
> write the code? Hmm? ... Nobody? Oh well, I guess nobody cares 
> enough to actually do it. Too bad."
>
>
> T

If something is wrong on your local D installation (library bug 
etc) and you fix it, you benefit from it, so the work is useful 
even if the change is refused on the public codebase, so no 
problem with that.

Changing a website without the owner content is automatically a 
waste of time.

Especially in this case. I don't need or use it locally, and in 
this particular case, what I suggest is the complete opposite of 
the current marketing strategy, and I've already been told that 
this won't happen in any foreseeing future.

So I'll follow this smart advice that I've been given, and pick 
another battle.



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