D is dead (was: Dicebot on leaving D: It is anarchy driven development in all its glory.)

[Shachar Shemesh]

On 22/08/18 21:34, Ali wrote:
> On Wednesday, 22 August 2018 at 17:42:56 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> Pretty positive overall, and the negatives he mentions are fairly 
>> obvious to anyone paying attention.
> 
> Yea, I agree, the negatives are not really negative
> 
> Walter not matter how smart he is, he is one man who can work on the so 
> many things at the same time
> 
> Its a chicken and egg situation, D needs more core contributors, and to 
> get more contributors it needs more users, and to get more users it need 
> more core contributors
> 

No, no and no.

I was holding out on replying to this thread to see how the community 
would react. The vibe I'm getting, however, is that the people who are 
seeing D's problems have given up on affecting change.

It is no secret that when I joined Weka, I was a sole D detractor among 
a company quite enamored with the language. I used to have quite heated 
water cooler debates about that point of view.

Every single one of the people rushing to defend D at the time has since 
come around. There is still some debate on whether, points vs. counter 
points, choosing D was a good idea, but the overwhelming consensus 
inside Weka today is that D has *fatal* flaws and no path to fixing them.

And by "fatal", I mean literally flaws that are likely to literally kill 
the language.

And the thing that brought them around is not my power of persuasion. 
The thing that brought them around was spending a couple of years 
working with the language on an every-day basis.

And you will notice this in the way Weka employees talk on this forum: 
except me, they all disappeared. You used to see Idan, Tomer and Eyal 
post here. Where are they?

This forum is hostile to criticism, and generally tries to keep everyone 
using D the same way. If you're cutting edge D, the forum is almost no 
help at all. Consensus among former posters here is that it is generally 
a waste of time, so almost everyone left, and those who didn't, stopped 
posting.

And it's not just Weka. I've had a chance to talk in private to some 
other developers. Quite a lot have serious, fundamental issues with the 
language. You will notice none of them speaks up on this thread.

They don't see the point.

No technical project is born great. If you want a technical project to 
be great, the people working on it have to focus on its *flaws*. The D's 
community just doesn't do that.

To sum it up: fatal flaws + no path to fixing + no push from the 
community = inevitable eventual death.

With great regrets,
Shachar