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

[Chris]

On Saturday, 24 November 2018 at 18:00:44 UTC, Grumpy wrote:
> On Saturday, 24 November 2018 at 17:37:36 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:

>
> Since the transparency of the leaders and the foundation is 
> very bad, let's look a little bit more about what secret 
> strategy they are concentrating on:
>
> Walter, months to convert the backend from C ++ to D, be 
> careful, in a compiler in which you can not even turn on the 
> GC, what a show, pride for the D programming language! Should 
> we talk about the DIP1000 documentation?
>
> Andrei: https://github.com/andralex
> Need to add more? More than a gatekeeper, this is a solid brick 
> wall.
>
> With these examples, the problem is the lack of contributions?
>
> This is pure collective madness.

I called it an "autocratic chaos". Since my brain (at least the 
left half) has been analyzed in this thread, let's take this a 
bit further and talk about psychology. I may well be that Walter 
and other core devs really feel that they are making great 
progress when porting DMD to D and stuff like that. Indeed, their 
own projects might be emotionally rewarding and trigger feelings 
of euphoria. So the projects they're emotionally involved in are 
much more important to them than dreadful stuff like fixing 
`autodecode` - naturally.

This causes a discrepancy between what users see / want / need 
and what the leadership sees / wants.

If the above is true, it has to be changed. A project like D 
cannot survive if it's only driven by personal preferences. In my 
own job I sometimes work on interesting and emotionally rewarding 
stuff, but I also have to do the head wrecking and boring stuff 
that may not even be related to writing code - boring but 
necessary.

It's not just a question of the - by now famous - $1,600 a month. 
I've seen other open source projects thrive because of a 
different community culture. "Do what you like or is important to 
you personally" will only get you so far. If people who are 
willing to volunteer see why they should spend time doing chore X 
or Y, they will do it. But if there's no clear vision and it 
takes ages to get a review / accepted, then why bother?