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

[Andre Pany]

On Monday, 15 April 2019 at 13:52:53 UTC, Dibyendu Majumdar wrote:
> On Monday, 15 April 2019 at 10:47:39 UTC, Andre Pany wrote:
>> On Monday, 15 April 2019 at 10:09:40 UTC, Dibyendu Majumdar 
>> wrote:
>>> On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 20:48:44 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
>>> wrote:
>>>> [...]
>>>
>>> I have considered using D for a long time, and yet haven't. 
>>> The reasons are maybe applicable to many. Ultimately it boils 
>>> down to what you need to do to make a living. If you had tons 
>>> of spare money you can probably afford to work on something 
>>> you like or think is good; but if you need to earn then you 
>>> have to go where the demand is.
>>>
>>> The tooling (editor and debugger) is important too for anyone 
>>> that wants to get the job done or suggest D to an 
>>> organisation. Here is a proposal:
>>>
>>> Freeze D development for 2 years and redirect all energy to 
>>> tooling.
>>
>> Could you please tell what do you miss from the tooling? For 
>> me Intellij D plugin combined with language server works like 
>> a charme. Code completion, linter, formatting, everything 
>> works fine  Dub is working perfectly for all my use cases. I 
>> was never in need to really start the debugger but debugging 
>> is working to some extend in windows and is working fine on 
>> linux. I am even able to develop applications in windows and 
>> using WSL directly compile and debug them on linux.
>
> I haven't tried recently but every time I tried in the past 
> there were issues... developers / companies expect tooling to 
> 'just work' so that they can get the job done.
>
> I do think tinkering endlessly with D / and its libraries is 
> the wrong focus. Instead core developers should select one set 
> of tooling and work on making them usable; D is already good 
> enough.
>
> It is no good saying to programmers that okay step up and fix 
> the tooling yourself. No one (unless they have spare cash to 
> burn) can afford to fix the tooling and then also do their 
> jobs. That's the reality whether anyone likes it or not.

One set of tooling will not work. I highly valuate that Rainer is 
working on Visual Studio plugin and Webfreak as far as I know is 
working on Visual Studio Code. But both tools I can't use because 
I dislike how MS designed the development workflow.  Each 
developer has his/her preference.

I used my spare time to improve the tools I use at work (dub, 
IntelliJ D plugin). It worths the effort, it makes you happy and 
the community.

Kind regards
Andre