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

[Joakim]

On Tuesday, 4 September 2018 at 13:34:03 UTC, 
TheSixMillionDollarMan wrote:
> 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.

That's a good question, let me see if I can answer it.

Do you know what the first search engine for the web was and when 
it was created? It wasn't Yahoo, google, or Bing:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine#History

The first search engines were created in 1993, google came along 
in 1998 after at least two dozen others in that list, and didn't 
make a profit till 2001. Some of those early competitors were 
giant "billion dollar global companies," yet it's google that 
dominates the web search engine market today.

Why is that? Well, for one, resources don't matter for software 
on the internet as much as ideas. It's not that resources don't 
matter, but that they take a back seat to your fundamental design 
and the ideas behind it.

And coming up with that design and ideas takes time, the 
"developmental stage" that Laeeth refers to above. In that 
incubation stage, you're better off _not_ having a bunch of 
normal users who want a highly polished product, just a bunch of 
early adopters who can give you good feedback and are okay with 
rough edges. For D, that means all the advanced features don't 
fully play together well yet, and there are various bugs here and 
there. To use it, you have to be okay with that.

Now, it's a fair question to ask when D will leave that 
developmental stage and get more resources towards that polish, 
as Chris asks, and I'm not saying I know the answers to those 
questions. And let me be clear: as long as you don't push the 
envelope with mixing those advanced D features and are okay 
working around some bugs here and there, you're probably good now.

But simply asserting that others are rushing full-speed ahead 
with more resources and therefore they will win completely 
misunderstands how the game has changed online. Resources do 
matter, but they're not the dominant factor like they used to be 
for armies or manufacturing. Ideas are now the dominant factor, 
and D has plenty of those. ;)