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

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 14:41:50 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 10:25:03 UTC, Guillaume Lathoud 
> wrote:
>> Maybe there is a psychological explanation for the debate here 
>> - please bear with me - just speculating:
>
> It's a lot less complicated than it sounds.
>
> Some average joes (you know who they are) with zero skin in the 
> game are given the chance to talk to incredible programmers and 
> have them answer in a sort of ego-tripping trance.
>
> But the only way to have them answer is to troll more or less 
> subtly, and this behaviour has been going on for years.
>
> The lesson should only be that the leadership **should not have 
> to listen to this whole load of non-sense** from anonymous 
> low-achievers that blame their tools. And they want things that 
> works well to fail with them.
>
> Do you imagine half the users of python-dev publicly berating 
> Guido, every day for anything he would says? No, because that 
> would be incredibly ridiculous.
>
> Hence why we have so many "helpful", anonymous poster who come 
> with bullet lists of things to do, every day. This must stop 
> because it is neither helpful nor with good intentions.

This rings true to me, although I would have put it more gently.

The better you do, the harder it is to get good feedback.  However
part of the reason for that is that there is a lot of 'free 
advice'
from people who don't live or die by the consequences of taking 
such
advice.

One way to tell the difference is to ask if the giver of advice 
acts
like someone who sincerely wants to achieve the same things you 
do and
has capabilities that lead them to having insight and has taken 
the
trouble to inform themselves about the situation.  Another 
important
question is do they at least in some way that's reasonable in 
relation
to the constraints of their situation do a bit towards furthering 
the
prospects of D.

It's a big big world and it's not going to work if one tries to 
make
everyone happy.  The beauty of voluntary co-operation is you 
don't need
to do that - just having a high appeal to a small proportion of 
the
population is enough.  Peter Thiel talks about this in Zero To 
One -
it's much better to have a monopoly, even if in relation to a 
small
market, that's one you earn and continue to earn every day than 
trying
to have a small share of an enormous market.  If that's the 
implicit
approach being followed then reducing your appeal to your core 
market
by trying to increase your appeal to everyone else may not be as
sensible as it might initially seem - at least one needs to think 
it
through a bit.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

In an open-source community, it's not possible to order people to 
work
on things they don't want to.  It's not necessarily even true of 
an
enterprise that you can order independent-minded people to work on
what doesn't appeal to them.

It's best to recognise reality if one wishes to be effective.  
That
doesn't mean that it won't be possible to accomplish things that 
don't
initially appeal to people for intrinsic reasons - just that you 
might
have to approach things in a different way.

The need for programming is - perhaps sadly - increasing in the 
world. I
say sadly because I'd be quite happy if I could just focus on 
things that
I myself find intrinsically interesting, and yet because software 
is
indeed eating the world, one doesn't in some situations have a 
choice.
Furthermore the need for performant code that permits control 
over memory
layout and yet still allows one to be reasonably productive and 
to morph
the code from a prototype to production code - the mysterious 
quality of
plasticity - that need is not diminishing.

Languages are not in a zero-sum fight to the death, not at all.  
There's
plenty of room for D to continue to succeed.  It's nice to know 
what people
think should be changed to improve things.  Perhaps Facebook are 
right that
working code (or whatever the relevant work product might be) 
wins arguments
much more effectively than words.  I wonder if channeling some of 
this
dissatisfaction in generative and creative directions wouldn't be 
better for
everyone.