Dicebot on leaving D: It is anarchy driven development in all its glory.

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Thursday, 6 September 2018 at 14:42:14 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Thursday, 6 September 2018 at 14:30:38 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
> wrote:
>> On Thursday, 6 September 2018 at 13:30:11 UTC, Chris wrote:
>>> And autodecode is a good example of experts getting it wrong, 
>>> because, you know, you cannot be an expert in all fields. I 
>>> think the problem was that it was discovered too late.
>>
>> There are very valid reasons not to talk about auto-decoding 
>> again:
>>
>> - it's too late to remove because breakage
>> - attempts at removing it were _already_ tried
>> - it has been debated to DEATH
>> - there is an easy work-around
>>
>> So any discussion _now_ would have the very same structure of 
>> the discussion _then_, and would lead to the exact same 
>> result. It's quite tragic. And I urge the real D supporters to 
>> let such conversation die (topics debated to death) as soon as 
>> they appear.
>
> The real supporters? So it's a religion? For me it's about 
> technology and finding a good tool for a job.

Religions have believers but not supporters - in fact saying you 
are a supporter says you are not a member of that faith or 
community.  I support the Catholic Church's efforts to relieve 
poverty in XYZ country - you're not a core part of that effort 
directly.

Social institutions need support to develop - language is a very 
old human institution, and programming languages have more 
similarity with natural languages alongst certain dimensions (I'm 
aware that NLP is your field) than some recognise.

So, why shouldn't a language have supporters?  I give some money 
to the D Foundation - this is called providing support.  Does 
that make me a zealot, or someone who confuses a computer 
programming language with a religion?  I don't think so.  I give 
money to the Foundation because it's a win-win.  It makes me 
happy to support the development of things that are beautiful and 
it's commercially a no-brainer because of the incidental benefits 
it brings.  Probably I would do so without those benefits, but on 
the other hand the best choices in life often end up solving 
problems you weren't even planning on solving and maybe didn't 
know you had.

Does that make me a monomaniac who thinks D should be used 
everywhere, and only D - the one true language?  I don't think 
so.  I confess to being excited by the possibility of writing web 
applications in D, but that has much more to do with Javascript 
and the ecosystem than it does D.  And on the other hand - even 
though I have supported the development of a Jupyter kernel for D 
(something that conceivably could make Julia less necessary) - 
I'm planning on doing more with Julia, because it's a better 
solution for some of our commercial problems than anything else I 
could find, including D.  Does using Julia mean we will write 
less D?  No - being able to do more work productively means 
writing more code, probably including more D, Python and C#.

I suggest the problem is in fact the entitlement of people who 
expect others to give them things for free without recognising 
that some appreciation would be in order, and that if one can 
helping in whatever way is possible is probably the right thing 
to do even if it's in a small way in the beginning.  This is of 
course a well-known challenge of open-source projects in general, 
but it's my belief it's a fleeting period already passing for D.

You know sometimes it's clear from the way someone argues that it 
isn't about what they say.  If the things they claim were 
problems were in fact anti-problems (merits) they would make 
different arguments but with the same emotional tone.

It's odd - if something isn't useful for me then either I just 
move on and find something that is, or I try to directly act 
myself or organise others to improve it so it is useful.  I don't 
stand there grumbling at the toolmakers whilst taking no positive 
action to make that change happen.