Feedback on Átila's Vision for D

[Chris]

On Wednesday, 16 October 2019 at 12:23:47 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
wrote:
>
> It's a bit too much irony for me. Your entire involvement with 
> this forum is to disparage D and drive people out (I've read 
> dozens of your posts). See the language you are using in this 
> very post:

Not true. If you go back to my older posts, I used to be quite 
enthusiastic about D, sometimes overly enthusiastic. But I've 
learned my lesson and I know now that some of the criticism of D 
that I criticized was actually valid. But your statement above 
shows that your an ideologue who doesn't mind tweaking the facts 
a little or going ad hominem for no reason other than that 
someone dares to mention some of the language's and the D 
Foundation's shortcomings - or you have invested so much into D  
professionally that you're afraid of losing customers or 
investors. I don't know and I don't care.

> - "failed ambitions in the past"

Yep. How many things have been tried becase C++/Go/Rust have it, 
how many half baked features have users had to put up with. 
Remember the semi-constructors without semi-dctors?

> - "D also needs a clean up" < implying it's too dirty to save, 
> which is just funny as ProtoObject and copy-ctor makes is 
> cleaner, the clean-up is actually in progress,

Cleaner in the sense that you don't have to work around 
autodecode for starters...

> - "It seems hasn't reached the critical mass of users" < it 
> "seems" but somehow it has to be asserted like truth? How do we 
> know that?

Has it reached the critical mass? In other languages, once 
there's a critical mass (Java comes to mind, and Python too) you 
get enough volunteers who develop great tools (package managers, 
IDE plugins etc.) This hasn't happened for D, so I suppose that D 
hasn't reached the critical mass of programmers yet.

> ...this sort of ready-made sentences been going for years and 
> of course they have an effect on perception and you are doing 
> it on purpose, every day.

Again: not true. Not every day. Secondly, I'm not doing it on 
purpose to disparage D, it's my two cents I throw in as an 
ex-user. But I can see that some of the points me and other 
heretics have raised are being taken on board now. Slowly but 
surely, as your first post in this thread shows.

> One idea to improve D marketing would be not to offer a tribune 
> for unsubstantiated criticism.

Pure ideology. What are you afraid of? Covering up the 
shortcomings of a product won't make it better and people will 
find out sooner or later. And as D doesn't have an oppressive 
mechanism behind it (state or a monopoly), people will go 
somewhere else. You can only convince with excellence, there are 
loads of alternatives, you know?