Dscanner - DCD - Dfix ... Editor support or the lack of it.

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sun, Jan 28, 2018 at 05:13:15PM -0700, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Sunday, January 28, 2018 15:06:49 H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> > But the thing is, this is not a proprietary language where people
> > are paid to do the grunt work.  It's unrealistic to expect that
> > random volunteers in the internet would go out of their way to
> > implement support for something they don't use themselves.
> > *Somebody* among the IDE crowd has to step up to do the work of
> > improving IDE support; otherwise no amount of complaints is going to
> > change a thing.
> 
> True. If something is going to happen, someone has to step up -
> probably multiple someones - and most of the folks who seem to be
> interested in putting the time in to develop D libraries or tools
> don't seem to be interested in IDE development. If more folks decide
> to put in the time and effort, we may eventually get to where some of
> these folks who want better IDE support want D's IDE support to be.

Given the number of people routinely clamoring for better IDE support,
it's disheartening how few among them are willing to step up to the
plate to do the work for the benefit of the others.  I don't know why
that is...  we don't seem to have the same problem for, say, vim
support. Maybe it's because (much?) less effort is involved, so people
feel it's less daunting to take it on.  Or maybe the folks who use vim
are simply more inclined to put in the effort to make things work, I
don't know.


> But part of my point is that good IDE support seems to be one of those
> things that generally only happens when a company pays for it. That's
> not always the same company who develops the language (if there even
> is a company behind the language), but if no company pays for such
> development, the odds are much, much lower that it's ever going to
> happen.

Then maybe we should recruit, say, a team lead from the Visual Studio
team or something, to learn D, then he'll be able to pull the right
strings to get better IDE support implemented. :-P


> Either way, more folks need to put some time and/or money towards IDE
> development for D, or the folks who want first class IDE support for D
> are never going to have what they want.

Still, it's strange that given the number of people who demand first
class IDE support, there are so few who are willing to contribute to
improving it.


> Personally, I don't really care, because I have no interest in such
> support.  I have no problem if it gets implemented, and it probably is
> better for the D community if we have better IDE support, but it
> wouldn't improve my life any. If we're going to get improved tooling,
> I'd rather see more improvements to stuff like dub than better IDE
> support. So, I generally ignore the complaints about the lack of good
> IDE support. Either way, it's not something that I'm going to spend
> time on. I have too much on my TODO list already.
[...]

It doesn't really concern me either, but neither do I want the
indifference of the non-IDE folk to be misunderstood as active neglect.
But people will see what they want to see, so meh, I guess.  All I can
say is, after coming to D, I did find some things not quite to my
liking, so I fixed them myself and submitted PRs. And so did many others
like me. And we're all better off for it.  Now if only more from the IDE
crowd would do the same, things might be different...


T

-- 
People say I'm indecisive, but I'm not sure about that. -- YHL, CONLANG