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

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, September 3, 2018 9:41:48 AM MDT Laurent Tréguier via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 15:23:12 UTC, Chris wrote:
> > On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 14:26:46 UTC, Laeeth Isharc
> >
> > wrote:
> >> On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 11:32:42 UTC, Chris wrote:
> >>> [...]
> >>
> >> D has never been about smooth experiences!  That's a
> >> commercial benefit if you think that hormesis brings benefits
> >> and you are not looking for programmers of the trained-monkey,
> >> strap a few APIs together type.
> >
> > It's high time it got a bit smoother if you want people to use
> > it. Is everybody who doesn't use cli and knows all compiler
> > flags by heart a coding monkey? Has it ever occurred to you
> > that people want a smooth experience so they can concentrate on
> > a job and get done with it?
>
> Yes. It almost sounds like a smooth experience would be a bad
> thing to have, especially with the classic "you don't need an IDE
> anyway" speech. Editing experience seems often dismissed as
> unimportant, when it's one of the first things new users will
> come across when trying out D. First impressions can matter a lot.

Most of the work that gets done is the stuff that the folks contributing
think is the most important - frequently what is most important for them for
what they do, and very few (if any) of the major contributors use or care
about IDEs for their own use. And there's tons to do that has nothing to do
with IDEs. There are folks who care about it enough to work on it, which is
why projects such as VisualD exist at all, and AFAIK, they work reasonably
well, but the only two ways that they're going to get more work done on them
than is currently happening is if the folks who care about that sort of
thing contribute or if they donate money for it to be worked on. Not long
ago, the D Foundation announced that they were going to use donations to pay
someone to work on his plugin for Visual Studio Code:

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

So, if you want stuff like that to get worked on, then donate or pitch in.

The situation with D - both with IDEs and in general - has improved greatly
over time even if it may not be where you want it to be. But if you're ever
expecting IDE support to be a top priority of many of the contributors, then
you're going to be sorely disappointed. It's the sort of thing that we care
about because we care about D being successful, but it's not the sort of
thing that we see any value in whatsoever for ourselves, and selfish as it
may be, when we spend the time to contribute to D, we're generally going to
work on the stuff that we see as having the most value for getting done what
we care about. And there's a lot to get done which impacts pretty much every
D user and not just those who want something that's IDE-related.

- Jonathan M Davis