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

[Mike Franklin]

On Saturday, 13 April 2019 at 17:03:23 UTC, Suleyman wrote:

> Instead of making a fork which is equivalent to making a coup 
> d'état why not try the election first Andrei said they need 
> managers I would contribute to that if I could do any good.

What election?  D is now embracing democracy?  I might go for a 
republic.

Anyway, forking does not mean the end of D any more than than 
having children means the end of their parents.  It's not a coup; 
it's natural evolution.

Lately, I've been contributing to D every day, as have a *very* 
few others.  But Walter, Andrei, and I seldom see eye to eye 
about what's important.  They've told me on more than one 
occasion that what I'm doing and what I want for D is not 
important (e.g. 
https://forum.dlang.org/post/pffvdn$v2$1@digitalmars.com).  I 
know of a couple others who have left the D scene over that.  In 
fact, I find that D has a major turnover problem largely stemming 
from that.

I've asked Walter and Andrei for their priorities so I could find 
something to work on that both I and they want.  They only gave 
me a few items (I wish they would have given me more), but I 
didn't find any of them all that important compared to other 
things I had on my list.

Lately, I find the things that Walter is doing in DMD to be a 
very low priority compared to all of the bugs in bugzilla for 
which only he is qualified to fix.  I wish he'd stop refactoring 
code and start fixing bugs, but, maybe his refactorings of late 
are laying some groundwork for more important stuff.  I don't 
know.  His work to convert the DMD backend to D last year was 
*most* welcome.

I almost never see Andrei doing much visible work.  Maybe he's 
too busy doing other things that I don't realize need done, or 
doing work through others, like his students.  I don't know.

I don't see what goes on behind the scenes, but from my 
perspective the majority of good work on D is done by handful of 
passionate volunteers who hold no real position in D.

Some transparency about what's going on, and where things are 
heading might go a long way.  If I see common ground, I'm in.

Andrei got me fired up about std.v2, "worrying too much about 
changing things", and "druntime must go...[we need an] opt-in 
continuum".  That's exactly what I've been trying to do in D for 
the past 5 years (understand I had to learn before I could 
actually do anything).  Finally, common ground.  I'm in, and I'm 
going to try to make that a reality.  However, if that does not 
materialize, I see too much adversity to change, I see things 
going in the wrong direction, or I face unnecessary obstruction, 
I'm not going to complain, lobby, etc; I'm going to go back to 
planning my alternative.

With regard to what motivates me to volunteer time and effort to 
a project, I have much in common with Howard Roark.

Mike