D is dead (was: Dicebot on leaving D: It is anarchy driven development in all its glory.)

[Chris]

On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 06:29:02 UTC, Pjotr Prins wrote:

> Hear, hear!
>
> Even though some languages like Julia, Rust and Go are much 
> better funded than D - and their creators have excellent taste 
> in different ways - they still have to go through similar 
> evolutionary steps. There is no fast path. Whatever design 
> decision you make, you always end up fixes bugs and corner 
> cases. I was amazed how behind Rust's debugger support was last 
> year (I witnessed a talk at FOSDEM). They are catching up, but 
> it just goes to show...

No programming language is ever finished. But most programming 
languages try to get the basics right first and then add new 
features. If you want to run you have to learn how to walk first. 
Languages take time to evolve, but we shouldn't be in a situation 
where the fixing of basic bugs and flaws are considered part of 
the "long term goals".

> One thing I want to add that we ought to be appreciative of the 
> work people put in - much of it in their spare time. I wonder 
> if W&A and others sometimes despair for the lack of 
> appreciation they get. Guido van Rossum burning out (W, 
> notably, was the one to post that here first) is a shame. Even 
> though he created a language which I find less tasteful he did 
> not deserve to be treated like that. Simple.

I hold both Walter and Andrei (and all the other great 
contributors) in high esteem and D was the right tool for me back 
in the day. Without it things would have been a lot harder. But I 
think D is past the laboratory stage and I as a user feel that 
our actual experience is less important than design experiments. 
Respect goes both ways, after all it's the users who keep a 
programming language alive. If there isn't something 
fundamentally wrong in the communication between the leadership / 
language developers and the users, why do we get posts like this:

"Thanks! Please add anything you think is missing to 
https://github.com/dlang/dlang.org/pull/2453 since Walter doesn't 
seem to be interested."

https://forum.dlang.org/post/mxgyoflrsibeyavvmjuq@forum.dlang.org

Not good.