Some thoughts

[bachmeier]

On Monday, 25 November 2019 at 16:53:43 UTC, berni44 wrote:

> From time to time there are threads in this forum with hundreds 
> of responses. Most of the time, after having read the first few 
> answers, there is nothing more in the rest of them, but one 
> repeating theme (often burrowed beneath the surface): Why is D 
> not the programming language no. 1?
>
> 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.
>
> For getting D up in those lists, which compare programming 
> languages, I think getting back to the fundamentals is most 
> important. I see two of them:
>
> a) Remove bugs
> b) Improve documentation

At this point, I don't think the problem is identifying work that 
needs to be done, but rather identifying ways to get it done.

You should, of course, file bug reports as appropriate, but 
that's not enough. Sticking with cars, what we have here is 
people seeing someone that's broke in a car with no gas by the 
side of the road. Telling him that he needs to put gas in to get 
going isn't going to accomplish much - he already knows that's 
why the car died, and he knows how to fix it. The only thing that 
will help is giving him money to buy gas, giving him a container 
of gas, or giving him a way to earn money needed to buy gas.

There are many comparisons with the experience provided by Go and 
Rust. Those languages had tremendous financial resources behind 
them. The greatest assistance you can give to D at this point is 
to come up with ideas to obtain more resources or otherwise come 
up with a plan to get the problems fixed. This has been discussed 
to death, but that doesn't accomplish anything. There is nobody 
that's going to read about the problems and start fixing them.