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

welkam wwwelkam at gmail.com
Wed Nov 28 20:09:20 UTC 2018


On Tuesday, 27 November 2018 at 08:52:07 UTC, Chris wrote:
>
> Fair enough, but again it's a very narrow focus, and people 
> interested in it can "twiddle around". For deployment we have 
> LDC anyway. A language needs a broader focus, i.e. 
> infrastructure, tools and, yes, an IDE.

Lets say A, B and C needs to be done but core team can only work 
on one thing. If they work on A people complain that B and C is 
not worked on. If they worked on B people complain that A and C 
is not worked on and if they worked on C people would complain 
that A and B is not being worked on.

In principle D could be best language for many things and people 
want their use case to be prioritized. But D doesnt have enough 
resources to work on all of that. Hack we dont have people 
working on std.io library, some std libraries are sub-par. If you 
write your project from scratch and it doesn't depend on external 
libraries then D is awesome but for everything else its just meh.

And about tools. These kinds of captain obvious advises are not 
welcomed. First they imply astronomical incompetence of everyone 
who works on D and second they just waste time. If you asked on 
forum if better tooling was useful for language growth you will 
get almost everyone agreeing. Its not that they just agree with 
words but they agree with actions
https://dlang.org/blog/2018/07/13/funding-code-d/

 From my personal experience tooling is noticeably better than 
last time I tired D.

>
> If you have worked with people (and you know a bit about 
> yourself) you don't need to read all that to know how people 
> feel and what motivates them.

Until you dive deep and find out that the last person you can 
trust is yourself. I found that most people project their 
thinking and feeling onto others and call it understanding. If we 
narrowed scope to what motivates people to work for free then one 
single reason might be that people work on things that they think 
are worth wile. Dont know how to better express that. English is 
not my native tongue.


>> What matters here is that you expect other people who worked 
>> 8h of boring stuff to go home and work on more boring stuff 
>> for free. These kind of people are rare and you are not one of 
>> them yourself.
>
> Well, I used to contribute a bit. Bug reports, the odd PR for 
> dlang and other simple stuff. I donated money twice (I think, 
> or was it three times?). I was seriously thinking about 
> contributing more

So you havent worked on boring stuff after 8h of potential boring 
stuff. Thats what I tried to convey.

> but then
>
> 1) I had to spend time fixing my own code due to dmd updates

 From what I can tell DMD improved on this. I use to hear about 
new updates breaking peoples code and now most of what I hear is 
that updates used to break code in the past. My guess unit tests 
improved this and they came mostly because compiler was converted 
to D.

>
> Now you may discard all of my points above as nonsense, because 
> maybe they are not mentioned in papers about behavioral 
> neuroscience and psychology (I've actually read quite a bit 
> about behavioral biology), but those were my thoughts.

My intention with that post was not to discredit your points. It 
was response to Walters question. I have seen many game devs 
listening too much on surface problems and not looking at 
underlying core issue. Then they release patch that doesnt make 
game better. What I want people to take form your posts is that D 
needs more people working on more stuff. We dont need people 
pointing stuff that is already know issue. It just waste people`s 
times. What we need is concrete action plan that is grounded in 
reality and doesn't have big flaws.
>
> There's loads, look at Linux distros and libraries that are 
> still used everywhere.
>

Like Ubuntu, red hat and suse? Red hat annual revenue is $2.9 
billion. That with a B. Now I cant find it but I remember reading 
that pacman was maintained by single person and some people were 
angry that for long time pacman didnt check download validity or 
something. If my examples were not what you thought than stop 
being vague and be more concrete.

P.s. we might be the only one left talking in this thread. We 
could talk about hentai and no one would be wiser :D






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