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

[Chris]

On Tuesday, 28 August 2018 at 07:30:01 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/27/2018 2:14 AM, Chris wrote:

>> bad feeling about the way things are going atm.
>
> I can quote you a loooong list of problems that are obvious 
> only in hindsight, by world leading development teams.
>
> Start by watching the documentary series "Aviation Disasters", 
> look at Challenger, Deepwater Horizon, Fukushima, Apollo 1, 
> Apollo 13, the World Trade Centers, etc. Of course, there are a 
> number of them in C, C++, Java, Javascript, basically every 
> language I've worked with.
>
> I'll guarantee every non-trivial project you've worked on has 
> problems that are obvious only in hindsight, too. If you wait 
> till it's perfect, you'll never ship, and yet it'll *still* 
> have problems.
>
> I'm not making excuses for mistakes - just don't have 
> unworkable requirements.

This is all good and well and I know that anyone who develops 
software shoots him/herself in the foot sooner or later. But this 
is not the same situation. If you have to ship something till 
date X, then you are under pressure and naturally make mistakes 
that are obvious only on hindsight. But D is not under pressure 
to  include new features so frequently. There's absolutely no 
reason to rush into something that eats up a lot of your time 
(better spent on more urgent problems) and by so doing produce 
possible breakages.

> The end of the day is, does D get the job done for you better 
> than other languages? That's a decision only you can make.

It has done a better job until recently. The problem are not 
things like @safe, `const` and whatnot, the problem are very 
practical issues such as fear of breakage / time spent fixing 
things and running the code on ARM, integration into other 
technologies (webasm).

Since the D Foundation was founded I really thought that part of 
the effort would go into stabilizing the language and developing 
better tools for various aspects of programming (not just 
language features). Programming is so much more than just 
language features, and languages that offer the "so much more" 
part are usually the ones people adopt. But somehow D still seems 
to be in its hobby hacker days. Features are first and foremost, 
everything else comes second. But features get "ripped" by other 
programming languages and they can pick and choose, because they 
know what really worked in D, while D has to struggle with the 
things that didn't work or only half worked.

Laeeth was talking about being analytical about the whole thing. 
Why not find out what features are really being used? I.e. does 
the majority really need - for practical purposes - partially 
constructed objects?

When people choose a programming language, there are several 
boxes that have to be ticked, like for example:

- what's the future of language X? (guarantees, stability)
- how easy is it to get going (from "Hello world" to a complete 
tool chain)
- will it run on ARM?
- will it be a good choice for the Web (e.g. webasm)?
- how good is it at data processing / number grinding
- etc.

I think the D Foundation should focus on the more "trivial" 
things too. If a company is asked to develop a data grinding web 
application along with a smart phone app - will it choose D? If a 
company offers localization services and translations - will it 
choose D (autodecode)?

The D community / leadership is acting as if they had all the 
time in the world. But other languages are moving fast and they 
learn from D what _not_ to do.

Last but not least, if it's true that the D Foundation has raised 
only 3.2K, then there's something seriously wrong.