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

[Mike Parker]

On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 18:26:57 UTC, Chris wrote:

>
> I think this sort of misunderstanding is the source of a lot of 
> friction on this forum. Some users think (or in my case: 
> thought) that D will be a sound and stable language one day, a 
> language they can use for loads of stuff, while the leadership 
> prefers to keep it at a stage where they can test ideas to see 
> what works and what doesn't, wait let me rephrase this, where 
> the user can test other people's ideas with every new release.

D is not a petri dish for testing ideas. It's not an experiment. 
It's a serious language. Walter, Andrei, and everyone involved in 
maintaining and developing it want to see it succeed. They aren't 
just treading water, wasting everyone's time. And I know you keep 
hearing this, but I'll say it anyway: most of the development is 
based on volunteer work, and trying to get volunteers to do 
anything they don't want to do is like asking them to voluntarily 
have their teeth pulled when they don't need to.

Walter has said that people come to him and ask what they should 
work on. He provides them with a list of priority tasks. Then 
they go off and work on something else. That's the nature of 
unsponsored open-source development and has been the biggest 
challenge for D for years.

I have high hopes that some of this can be turned around by 
raising more money and I have long-term plans to try and 
facilitate that over the coming months. With more money, we can 
get people to work on targeted tasks even when they have no 
vested interest in it. We can pull in full-time coders, maybe get 
someone to oversee PR reviews so they don't stay open so long, 
fund development of broader ecosystem projects.

There isn't anyone involved in the core D development who isn't 
aware of the broader issues in the community or the ecosystem, 
and they are working to bring improvements. I have been around 
this community since 2003. From my perspective, it has been one 
continuous march of progress. Sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but 
always moving, always getting better. And right now there are 
more people involved than ever in moving it forward.

Unfortunately, there are also more demands on more fronts than 
ever. There are longtime users who become increasingly frustrated 
when the issues that matter to them still aren't resolved, 
newcomers who have no context of all the progress that has been 
made and instead hold D in comparison to Rust, Go, and other 
languages that have stronger backing and more manpower. That's 
perfectly legitimate.

And of course, low manpower and funding aren't the complete 
picture. Management also play a role. Both Walter and Andrei have 
freely admitted they are not managers and that they're learning 
as they go. Mistakes have been made. In hindsight, some decisions 
should have gone a different way. But that is not the same as not 
caring, or not understanding/

So please, don't attribute any disingenuous motives to any of the 
core team members. They all want D to succeed. Identifying core 
problems and discussing ways to solve them is a more productive 
way to spend our bandwidth.