Rather D1 then D2

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, September 22, 2018 7:34:55 PM MDT rikki cattermole via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 23/09/2018 2:31 AM, Jonathan Marler wrote:
> > On Saturday, 22 September 2018 at 13:25:27 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
> >> Then D isn't the right choice for you.
> >
> > I think it makes for a better community if we can be more welcoming,
> > helpful a gracious instead of responding to criticism this way. This is
> > someone who saw enough potential with D to end up on the forums but had
> > some gripes with it, after all who doesn't? I'm glad he took the
> > initiative to provide us with good feedback, and he's not the first to
> > take issue with the inconsistent '@' attribute syntax.  I'm sure
> > everyone can agree this inconsistency is less than ideal but that
> > doesn't mean D isn't right for them and we should respond this feedback
> > like this with thanks rather than dismissal.
>
> It's much better for the language and for the person looking into a
> technology to be open to saying that it isn't the right tool for the job
> after some discussion which has taken place.
>
> I would much rather stop people looking instead of trying to impose
> changes on us that are not likely to happen in any acceptable time span.
> Let alone at all. At least then, they can look back and see that we
> didn't want to waste their or our time trying to compromise on something
> that wasn't going to happen anyway.
>
> After all, don't we want to make people happy with their decision?

We want to understand where D can and should be improved, but we also need
to acknowledge where it shouldn't be changed. Not everyone is going to be
happy with it, and we shouldn't try to make it so that everyone is going to
be happy with it. For instance, from what I know of Go, I would be
_extremely_ unhappy with it, and yet there are folks who absolutely love it.
Would I try to convince such folks to come to D? No. If that's the kind of
taste that they have in languages, I'd rather that they'd stay away from D
and not risk affecting it in a negative way for me. On the other hand, if D
fits reasonably well for someone but doesn't quite fit well enough due to
some problem with the language, then maybe there's something that we can do
to address that, making D work for them, and making it a better language for
the rest of us.

Ultimately, it's a question of balance. We want to improve D and make it
work for more people, but we also don't want to make it worse for ourselves
in the process of trying to make it work better for someone else. Listening
to complaints about the language from both those trying it out and those who
use it regularly can be important. Ultimately though, I think that it makes
a lot more sense to focus on trying to fix the problems that existing users
have rather than trying to fix the problems that potential users have. As
Walter likes to talk about, when someone tells you why they're not using
something, and you solve that problem for them, they always have another
reason. And really, while we want D to have a large user base, as users of
the language, first and foremost, we want it to work well for ourselves. If
we can make the language work really well for what we need, then it will
work well for other people as well, even if it won't work well for everyone.

With regards to D1 users who are unhappy with D2, I think that it makes some
sense to point out that a subset of D2 can be used in a way that's a lot
like D1, but ultimately, if someone doesn't like the direction that D2 took,
they're probably better off finding a language that better fits whatever it
is that they're looking for in a language. Trying to convince someone to use
a language that they don't like is likely to just make them unhappy.

- Jonathan M Davis