Some thoughts

[mipri]

On Monday, 25 November 2019 at 16:53:43 UTC, berni44 wrote:
> From my perspecive, D is currently like a racing car with rusty
> axis, flat tyre and hardly working breaks. But people discuss
> about adding a rear spoiler, whether a new turbo gear will help
> and maybe sometimes even the color of the car. And then they
> wonder, why the car still is not no. 1.

I think I understand you, but that others might miss the point,
so to be clear, it's not that colors are never worth
discussing, or that a real spoiler wouldn't help. It is not
that these other conversations shouldn't happen but that the
*focus* on them is a violation of something like Maslow's
hierarchy of needs, but for programming languages.

Suppose dlang.org were down, the entire website, for months
or more. People wouldn't say of D, "nah you shouldn't pick
that up, the language has too many features." or "it has too
many attributes that you have to stick on functions". They
would say "it's obviously dead; nobody cares even to maintain
the website!"

But a website is a relatively mundane and boring thing. It's
not distinctive of D that it has a website--every language has
one. If a big D release came out and the changelog were all
about the website, people would not be impressed in the
slightest. I know a guy who knows a guy who could maintain a
website for you for a pittance.

It's merely a website, and yet, it is vitally important, to the
degree that almost nothing else about D would make a difference
if this one part of D were absent.

Trivial bugs and documentation are a level up the needs
hierarchy from having a website, but they're still several
levels down below most of what's discussed here.

> The next time, when I had this experience again, was a few
> years ago with D. And when I wanted to report the bug, I found
> out that it's been reported allready years ago. And this
> repeated several times since. If allready one bug is enought to
> make people discuss moving to an other language, what do dozens
> of them do?

Rather than obscure bugs that crop up in obscure cases only,
what I dislike most are "flat tire" bugs, to continue your car
metaphor. A flat tire is obvious and it's relatively easy to
fix, so if you see one, it just means that nobody cares, or
nobody has even tried to drive the thing.

I've had the "has anyone ever even tried to use this thing?"
thought a few times with third-party packages. Not with Phobos
as yet. Actually all the package maintainers I've reported bugs
to have been very responsive and have gotten them fixed, so I
wouldn't write a long goodbye letter over something like this,
and I don't even want to give examples because it'd be unfair
to them even though some of the bugs would make for great
examples.

The D website though has some "nobody cares" tier bugs, like
all the 404s in the library documentation:

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19725

Or that run.dlang.io's 'shorten' button has been broken for 17
days:

https://github.com/dlang-tour/core/issues/739