Has D failed? ( unpopular opinion but I think yes )

[Nierjerson]

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 15:52:17 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 15:25:05 UTC, Nierjerson wrote:
>
>> And this is the problem. Those hard core users like yourself 
>> that pretend that popularity doesn't matter.
>
> The D language is sort of like the Arch Linux community used to 
> be (and maybe still is, but I no longer use it). New users 
> would come in and comment "you need more GUI support", "you 
> need to stop expecting people to compile their own software", 
> and "your distro will never become popular with an attitude 
> like this community". The goal of the Arch Linux project was 
> very explicitly to provide a high quality option for users that 
> wanted a distro following a particular philosophy. The D 
> language offers what it offers. If anything, the complaints are 
> that the things it offers should be of higher quality, that the 
> project needs to scale back further.

Um, Everything offers what it offers. It is nonsensical response 
because it is always true and hence says nothing about what D 
does.

Why would anyone put in years of their life in to something just 
to throw it away?

If D's goal was to provide a few decades of a marginal language, 
then it has achieved that, but I somehow doubt that was what it 
was written for.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019?utm_source=so-owned&utm_medium=announcement-banner&utm_campaign=dev-survey-2019

You can see that D doesn't show up at all anywhere and also what 
most programmers do and expect. If one is serious about creating 
useful programming platform, to ignore such things is ignorant 
and detrimental.



> I don't think anyone is saying we should drive away users. But 
> that is different from saying that popularity will drive all 
> decisions and all contributions to D.

I never said that. I said popularity brings benefits and 
popularity IS required for longevity. Popularity is longevity. 
Popularity is a function of time AND when it reaches 0 then what 
the popularity represents is dead.

What I'm saying is those that believe D will survive and be a 
useful platform and ignore all the things that drive useful 
platforms is being ignorant. No one knows exactly what it takes 
to make anything successful, but there are fundamental principles 
involved and when they are ignored then there is no success.



>> So many users here think "I like D and it is good enough for 
>> me" not realizing that not catering to the masses is putting 
>> nails in the coffin.
>
> If you have a few million to contribute to hiring a team to 
> cater to the masses, this is a sensible argument. As things 
> currently stand, catering to the masses will not happen, 
> because there are no resources to do so. Sun had the money to 
> do it, the D Language Foundation does not.
>

No, your argument is not sensible. Why? Because the only way to 
cater to the masses is to cater to them.  You say there are no 
resources... why? Because You haven't fucking catered to the 
masses. What do you expect, a flip to switch and then the masses 
come?

That is not how things work. It must be built. If the D community 
gave a rates ass about the bigger picture, it would have done 
things that would have attracted more people, then those people 
would then contribute more, and it would feed back in to itself. 
It D this to some degree but only attracted more die hard 
programmers who were willing to invest their time or hoped for 
the best.

D has had 20 years to build a huge community and it has failed. 
It's simple as that... the reason why it has failed is because 
building a large community was never accepted as necessary to 
help D progress.

With most language, or anything really, when you have 1M people 
using it, they will create shit for it on their own without any 
regard for anything. This is what humans do. D has had that. But 
D never had 1M, it might have had 10k at most. That means the 
maximum that can be achieved is from 10k, not 1M, or 10M, or 
100M. So D has shot itself in the head by not making community 
building apart of it's plan of success.

The attitude "We will not cater to the mass of moron programmers" 
has hurt D, possibly been the one thing that is killing it.

I see many of you guys that refuse to accept the need to proper 
tooling that appeals to the masses. You pretend that all the new 
programmers that could help D thrive who are used to using GUI's 
and tooling of modern languages should be forced to use tooling 
20+ years ago.


Most new programmers who are looking for languages to latch on to 
are kids who have certain mentalities and ideas... and trying to 
force them to go back in time isn't going to attract them. There 
is a huge misconception in by the management and leadership of D 
related to this.


Oh, and to pretend the masses don't matter yet here and there one 
of the leaders will post stats about how D is becoming more 
popular. So, yes they do think about it but no the increase is 
not significant.


>> See, it is not that D itself is a bad language, it is that the 
>> whole atmosphere surrounding it, how it is managed, is the 
>> problem. Some things are done well but others poorly, 
>> eventually those things that are neglected will catch up 
>> because the community seems to care not one bit about them. 
>> The cracks are getting bigger and bigger, I'm sorry you can't 
>> see them.
>
> To the extent that this is true, we are still constrained by 
> reality. Without resources there is no point in talking about 
> changes that have to happen. It's easy to come up with ideas 
> for work other should do. It's a bit harder to come up with 
> ideas and then make them happen.


AGAIN, the reason why there are no resources is BECAUSE you don't 
have the people BECAUSE you don't attract the people. It is not a 
switch!!! It is a process. You do shit to attract people, some 
come, then you take those people and do some more shit and more 
people come, and so forth. When you do the WRONG shit, you don't 
attract anyone AND so you MUST stop doing that. The management 
loves to do the wrong shit and pretend it is right.

and THIS is why D will die. Because it has not built up over the 
20 years the resources it could have now. It is a rocket that 
didn't have enough thrust to get escape velocity. At some point 
it will start falling. [The difference is that a rocket can't 
change but management can]

Your logic is exactly this: "I have no money so I can't be a 
millionaire which will let me make more money". It's nonsensical.

The only way to make money is to make money, the millions come 
from that process.

If D focused more on building a larger community then it more 
people will come and the community will grow and more things will 
happen such as more resources(which, for programming is 99% human 
effort so it is PURELY humans that are required).


> My recommendation is that you move on to another language if 
> you don't like the current state of affairs. I don't see it 
> changing in the next decade. (Interpret that statement as you 
> wish, but this is reality, there is no reason to pretend 
> otherwise or talk about changes that "should" happen.)
>

I already have. I only use D for minor things that it works well 
for. I do not use it for anything serious any more. It's cut my 
productivity by a quarter if not more. I have over 10 languages I 
program in and D is my last choice for anything that involves $$$ 
and complexity. And guess what! It's all precisely due to the 
tooling. The language itself impedes me very little(there are 
problems here and there but it seems have become much more stable 
than it was when I first started using it).


  The D language works very well for me. It may not work for
> others. And that's okay.

Yep, exactly, and that is why you are part of the problem. This 
is why I stopped taking D seriously. Because it's all the people 
in the community are "It's about me, Id on't give a shit about 
you!" attitude. See, you are not the first one that has said that 
in this thread. I've seen it by two other people.

It's people like you that are the problem. One day you will reap 
what you sow. You have invested years in to D, probably suck at 
most other languages now, and when D falls through(What happens 
when Walter dies? It's coming, it's not a macabre thing, it's 
just a fact of life) what are you going to do? Are you going to 
take it over and keep the train going? Do you think the rest of 
the guys are going to help you? How many people you got? how many 
will it take?

What I tend to find in the D community is a lot of people with no 
real understanding of how project management works and the real 
issues projects face. They don't understand complexity nor 
simplicity. It's true that they understand these things better 
that most programmers such as most JS programmers, but most JS 
programmers don't have any control in any way what so ever about 
their language.

With D, people like you get to reinforce the illogical 
mentalities of the management and so actually do much harm to the 
success of D. You can't be told other wise because you are right. 
You won't listen to facts, even facts that you know are true and 
state yourself. You always find some justification that does not 
prove your conclusions wrong.

D as a language is great, D as a community/management is 
terrible. There is a huge imbalance between the two and 
unfortunately D won't survive the latter[Although someone might 
come along and reincarnate it in to something new, that can't be 
bet on to have any significance].

If you actually look at the D forums you will see only maybe 40 
active regulars. Seriously, at MOST. Even if we make that in to 
1000, or 10000, it compares NOTHING to the main language D 
competes against. C++ has hundreds of millions of active regulars 
in forums all across the web.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/d

Look how dead it is! Your perception is not reality. You can 
pretend everything is peachy perfect but the facts show that you 
are blind... and you are digging your own grave(D wise).

It is not pessimism to speak the truth. I want D to succeed just 
as much as anyone else here, but it isn't. I'm stating these 
things to try to wake up people like you so that maybe you will 
change and get with the program to try and save D, but like most 
things, you will choose to ignore reality until it strangles you 
and you are forced to realize what has happened.

Even, if I'm exaggerating, even if the numbers were all off by a 
few orders of magnitude, they are still far too low compared to 
comparable languages or where D should be by now.

It is people like you that are the problem. I truly don't think 
you get it. I think your logic is warped and you conclude the 
wrong things. I could be wrong and I'm not saying you are moron 
or that everything you conclude is wrong... but in certain things 
you either fail to be logical or fail to measure correctly(you 
over or under estimate and then never double check yourself by 
converse logic to see if you are even in the same ball bark as 
the truth).


..and, basically you have already said it, as others have, you 
don't really care... and that, ultimately, is the real problem. 
You simply do not care enough about D to criticize it enough to 
have it do better. If you raised kids your parenting style is "Go 
out and play, you can do your homework tomorrow" because you 
really don't care enough about your kids to do the hard work so 
that it pays off for you and them. I feel Walter is in that boat 
and many others. It's as if you guys really think it's suppose to 
be easy and everything is suppose to just magically come together 
without any blood sweat and tears. It really has nothing to do 
with D ultimately, it is just the thing we happen to all cross 
paths with. If we were in another universe it would be a similar 
thing but over something different. It seems to be a human thing 
when the human mind just ultimately gives up the war and only 
fights the battles to safe face or to keep the charade going on.