Being Positive

[Pjotr Prins]

On Tuesday, 13 February 2018 at 03:15:44 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> I don't see a negative trend. It's always been negative around 
> here, and I've never understood why. It's the best language 
> I've used by a significant margin. D is the inverse of the Lisp 
> community, which believes the Common Lisp Hyperspec was 
> delivered on stone tablets.

Funny. Maybe it is a self-organising engineering culture that has 
evolved. We have a mixture of critical people here and the 
occasional nutcase. You see that in most popular FOSS projects, 
but D is pretty extreme.

The harmful part of all theses messages, apart from disgusting 
the more sensitive among us, is that I find people (say at this 
FOSDEM - btw great talk Kai) telling me that D is immature. These 
people read these threads. So they don't even try D. Being 
positive helps recruit people into trying things out on their 
own. I would not call it social engineering per se, but 
ultimately you want people to come in the door and try stuff. 
Only then will merit pay off.

I start to wonder if we just shut off and remove the forum 
history would actually improve the takeup of D. I wonder if 
project leaders would stop posting it would actually improve the 
takeup of D. Maybe we should just try that for a year. Someone I 
knew would (in the days of paper) move his inbox into the trash. 
He would say: if it is really important it will come back. A 
clean slate makes the day fresh.

My proposal: remove the forum and history completely and for a 
year only produce blogs. We still have github, bugzilla, DIPs 
etc. Plenty ways to express yourself and contribute. Project 
leaders stop posting so they can focus on the technical side of 
things.

> I've even raised the issue myself. Everyone complains about 
> Walter and Andrei and the lack of tools and so on, but I see a 
> lot of progress. I don't really care about who isn't using D or 
> why. For many years I saw the same thing in the Linux community 
> yet year after year I had a computer that just worked.

Yes. Remember the days everyone was using Windows and just a few 
of us were using Linux. I do not think D will be *that* 
successful, but it has enough momentum to keep going. It is a 
solid investment in my book.