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

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Tuesday, 4 September 2018 at 02:24:25 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Sep 2018 at 18:45, Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d 
> <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> It's been a key hurdle for as long as I've been around here.
> I've been saying for 10 years that no company I've ever worked 
> at can
> take D seriously without industry standard IDE support.
> My feeling is that we have recently reached MVP status... 
> that's a
> huge step, 10 years in the making ;)
> I think it's now at a point where more people *wouldn't* reject 
> it on
> contact than those who would. But we need to go much further to 
> make
> developers genuinely comfortable, and thereby go out of their 
> way to
> prefer using D than C++ and pitch as such to their managers.
> Among all developers I've demo-ed or introduced recently, I can 
> say
> for certain that developer enthusiasm is driven by their 
> perception of
> the tooling in the order of 10x more than the language.

That's only because you insist on working for companies where 
people use IDEs and think the ones that don't must be in boring 
industries :)

Kidding aside, would you care to enumerate what capabilities are 
missing that would tip the balance for such people were they to 
be there?

And then would you care to estimate the degree of work involved 
in implementing them.  For decent and motivated people, how many 
man years ?

Knowing the full scope of a problem is sometimes one step towards 
solving it.

And how would you rate the importance of  tooling Vs finishing 
C++ integration
?