Feedback on Átila's Vision for D

[Chris]

On Tuesday, 15 October 2019 at 16:16:24 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
wrote:
>
> If you pardon me making yet another "D need this" post:
>
> (This is not a criticism about the vision but more an 
> observation of the D vision until now)
>
> There are no "community" points in the above vision but mostly 
> language points, so I think it continues in a not-that-fruitful 
> direction, a sort of escapism.
>
> Language nowadays are co-designed along with the community ; 
> this community's task is to create the open-source ecosystem 
> that will lure users into using the language. Of course, it's 
> up to the community to self-organize, however a bit of topdown 
> organizing/funneling users can always help.
>
> Availability of open source libraries are the #1 reason people 
> use a new programming language.
>
> But the problem is that our ecosystem of libraries, while it 
> exists and has solution for most everything, interoperates 
> pretty badly. It is not maintained enough (or for the latest 
> compilers only), and/or isn't generally dependable.
>
> Perhaps because of our native backgrounds, we are still quite 
> bad at sharing code. Nothing to do with what happens in the NPM 
> ecosystem. We need to go out of our way to create high-quality, 
> dependable software artifacts with shared maintenance that can 
> be reused.
>
> This means, practically-speaking:
> - fixed DUB rankings
> - fixed DUB search
> - gamification of HQ library creation
> - focus on DUB user experience (the one gateway to compiler 
> cmdline)
> - cooperation over multiple-solutions
> - better documentation as a way to get the people to do the 
> above points
>
> I'm just not excited about language-level features

Good point, and it has been made before by various people on the 
forum. Átilas vision sounds good and very ambitious. Then again, 
D also needs a clean up due to failed ambitions in the past, and 
D needs proper tooling (like in the Java world). So what you need 
are TWO teams: one that cleans up, improves and extends D, and 
one that builds the tooling and infrastructure. The latter will 
be more difficult to find, because from what I've seen on this 
forum it seems that most professional and hobby users don't care 
so much about the tools as they often have their own custom made 
build tools for D and they are much more interested in features 
and libraries.

Does anyone have a plan how to get people on board who want to 
invest time and effort in a sound ecosystem? It seems that D 
hasn't reached the critical mass of users yet that enough people 
are frustrated and thus join efforts to make things easier (again 
cf. Java). How will you guys tackle that?