It is the year 2020: why should I use / learn D?

[Joakim]

On Sunday, 25 November 2018 at 06:56:10 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 11/24/2018 7:19 AM, Chris wrote:
>> Of course you cannot do everything alone. I never expected 
>> that. But ARM was never really high on the agenda.
>
> It cannot be high on the agenda without a self-motivated, 
> competent person to work on it.
>
>
>> But it is essential enough that it should have gotten a higher 
>> priority than just to wait until someone stepped up.
>
> I have a lot of history with people asking me "what can I work 
> on?" I give them a list of suggestions, and they work on 
> something not on that list, i.e. what they want to work on.
>
> The D community is a volunteer one. I cannot order anyone to 
> work on anything.

Sure, you don't have that hard power but you have plenty of soft 
power, which you don't seem to be using well:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power

Two big communication mistakes I've seen from you and Andrei that 
I've been banging on for years now, which I think others are also 
alluding to:

1. Little to no clear communication on what the roadmap moving 
forward is, though the Vision statements have filled that gap 
somewhat. Of course, they seem to have stopped right when they 
were getting useful and less vague.

You're right that many will just disregard your roadmap, but this 
ignores that there are others who are simply looking for a way to 
pitch in, like junior devs, and will gladly pick off something on 
a list you make. But this is why it's important to provide 
concrete tasks, rather than vague goals like "improve safety," so 
they can dive in easily.

2. Little notice of what you two are actually working on now, PRs 
often just show up out of the blue. This precludes others from 
either avoiding doing that work because you're already doing it, 
or pitching in to help you out. Presumably you two have some kind 
of TODO list that you could just share publicly?

Another possibility in this vein is putting together a list of 
things you either don't want or would like to see in the 
language, like Swift's list of commonly rejected changes:

https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/master/commonly_proposed.md

This is actually the hard power you do have, as the gatekeepers 
for dmd and Phobos.

I understand that as an engineer this may all seem unnecessary 
overhead, but if this project is ever to scale beyond where it's 
at now, it will have to be done.