Dicebot on leaving D: It is anarchy driven development in all its glory.

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 19:34:39 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On Sun, 26 Aug 2018 at 12:10, RhyS via Digitalmars-d 
> <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 18:18:04 UTC, drug wrote:
>> > It's rather funny to see how one man who forced to program in
>> > programming language he doesn't like can triggers comments 
>> > from
>> > lurkers that they don't like D too. No offense.
>> > D is in great form and is getting much better and better and
>> > I'd like to ask D community to continue their good work and
>> > make D great again.
>>
>> Most people lurking here are people that WANT to use D but are 
>> offset by the issues. D is not bad as a language but it has 
>> issue. Their are issues at every step in the D eco system and 
>> each of those create a barrier.
>>
>> Its those same issues that never seem to get solved and are 
>> secondary citizens compared to adding more "future" features 
>> or trying to Up-one C++...
>>
>> Its not BetterC or static if or whatever new feature of the 
>> month, that brings in new people. You can advertise D as much 
>> as you want, but when people download D and very few people 
>> stay, is that not a hint...
>>
>> The fact that only recently the D Poll pointed out that most 
>> people are using VSC and not VS. I am like "what, you only 
>> figure that out now". Given the mass popularity of VSC... That 
>> alone tells you how much the mindset of D is stuck in a 
>> specific eco space.
>
> Industry tends to use VS, because they fork-out for the 
> relatively
> expensive licenses.
> I work at a company with a thousand engineers, all VS users, D 
> could
> find home there if some rough edges were polished, but they
> *absolutely must be polished* before it would be taken 
> seriously.
> It is consistently expressed that poor VS integration is an 
> absolute
> non-starter.
>
> While a majority of people (hobbyists?) that take an online 
> poll in an
> open-source community forum might be VSCode users, that doesn't 
> mean
> VS is a poor priority target.
> Is D a hobby project, or an industry solution? I vote the 
> latter. I
> don't GAF about peoples hobbies, I just want to use D to _do my 
> job_.
> Quality VS experience is critical to D's adoption in that 
> sector.
> Those 1000 engineers aren't reflected in your poll... would you 
> like them to be?

Do you see a path from here to there that's planned?

I think it's very difficult winning over people that expect to 
see the same degree of polish as in a project thats older and has 
much more commercial support. In other words as a thought 
experiment if everyone in the community were to stop and work 
only on VS and debugging polish, how many years would it be 
before your colleagues were willing to switch?

I think it might be a while.

I'm not suggesting that polish isn't worth working on, but one 
might be realistic about what may be achieved.

I think D is a classic example of Clayton Christensen's 
Innovators Dilemma.  In the beginning a certain kind of 
innovation starts at the fringe.  It's inferior alongst some 
dimensions compared to the products with high market share and so 
it gets kind of ignored.  But for some particular reasons it has 
a very high appeal to some groups of people and so it keeps 
growing mostly unnoticed and over tiny expands the niches where 
it is used.

This can keep going for a long time.  And then something in the 
environment changes and it's like it becomes an overnight 
success.  For American cars it was the oil price shock of the 
1970s.  Japanese cars then might have been seen as inferior but 
they were energy efficient and they worked.

I think it's possible that for D this will arise from the 
interaction of data set sizes growing - storage prices drop at 
40% a year and somehow people find a way to use that cheaper 
storage - whilst processing power and memory latency and 
bandwidth is a sadder tale. But it might be something else.

So people who say that there is no place for D in the kind of 
work they do might sometimes be right.  Frustrating because if 
only the polish were there, but polish is a lot of work and not 
everyone is interested in it.  They might not be right about 
broader adoption because the world is a very big place,most 
people don't talk about their work, and because some of the 
factors that present huge obstacles in some environments simply 
don't apply in others.

Thinking about frustrations as an entrepreneurial challenge may 
be ultimately more generative than just hoping someone will do 
something.  I do wonder if there isn't an opportunity in 
organising people from the community to work on projects that 
enterprise users would find valuable but that won't get done 
otherwise.  Organising the work might not be difficult, but it 
takes time and attention, which enterprise users are not long on.