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

[TheSixMillionDollarMan]

On Tuesday, 4 September 2018 at 01:36:53 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 18:26:57 UTC, Chris wrote:
>
> 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.

I think D's 'core' problem, is that it's trying to compete with, 
what are now, widely used, powerful, and well supported 
languages, with sophisticate ecosystems in place already. 
C/C++/Java/C# .. just for beginners.

Then it's also trying to compete with startup languages (Go, Rust 
....) - and some of those languages have billion dollar 
organisations behind them, not to mention the talent levels of 
their *many* designers and contributors.

C++ is much more than just a langauge. It's an established, 
international treaty on what the language must be.

Java is backed by Oracle (one the of the largest organisations in 
the world).

Go is backed by Google...Rust by Mozilla...(both billion dollar 
global companies).

So one has to wonder, what would motivate a person (or an 
organisation) to focus their attention on D.

That is not a statement about the quality of D. It's a statement 
about the competitive nature of programming languages.

If you've ever read 'No Contest - the case against competition' 
by Alfie Kohn, then you'd know (or at least you might agree with 
that statement) that competition  is not an inevitable part of 
human nature. "It warps recreation by turning the playing into a 
battlefield."

I wonder has already happened to D.

D should, perhaps, focus on being a place for recreation, where 
one can focus on technical excellence, instead of trying to 
compete in the battlefield.

I just do not see, how D can even defeat its' major competitors.

Instead D could be a place where those competitors come to look 
for great ideas (which, as I understand it, does occur .. ranges 
for example).

In any case, you have to work out what it is, that is going to 
motivate people to focus their attention on D.

You seem to be saying that, raising money so you can pay people, 
is enough.

But I wonder about that.