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

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 17:15:03 UTC, Laurent Tréguier 
wrote:
> On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 16:55:10 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
> wrote:
>> 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
>
> The complaints I have is exactly why I'm myself maintaining 
> plugins for VSCode, Atom, and others soon. Don't worry, I still 
> think D is worth putting some time and effort into and I know 
> actions generally get more things done than words.
> I also know that tons of stuff is yet to be done in regards to 
> the actual compilers and such.
>
> It just baffles me a bit to see the state of D in this 
> department, when languages like Go or Rust (hooray for yet 
> another comparison to Go and Rust) are a lot younger, but 
> already have what looks like very good tooling.
> Then again they do have major industry players backing them 
> though...

Why is Go's IDE support baffling?  It was a necessity to achieve 
Google's commercial aims, I should think.

"
The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not 
researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of 
school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably 
learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant 
language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the 
language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand 
and easy to adopt."
  – Rob Pike

I don't know the story of Rust, but if I were working on a 
project as large as Firefox I guess I would want an IDE too!  
Whereas it doesn't seem like it's so important to some of D's 
commercial users because they have a different context.

I don't think it's overall baffling that D hasn't got the best 
IDE support of emerging languages.  The people that contribute to 
it, as Jonathan says, seen to be leas interested in IDEs and no 
company has found it important enough to pay someone else to work 
on it.  So far anyway but as adoption grows maybe that will 
change.