Feedback on Átila's Vision for D

[H. S. Teoh]

On Wed, Oct 16, 2019 at 05:52:33PM +0000, Paul Backus via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Wednesday, 16 October 2019 at 17:40:42 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
> > On Wednesday, 16 October 2019 at 16:42:28 UTC, Rumbu wrote:
[...]
> > > https://rawgit.com/wilzbach/state-of-d/master/report.html
[...]
> > Which parts of that survey would you like the vision to include?
> 
> Given that the community has already spoken, I think the onus is on
> the language maintainers at this point to take the results into
> account (or not).
[...]

Yes, yes, and yes!  The language maintainers need to take this survey
into consideration, especially considering it represents a significant
number of D users (about 500+, give or take depending on the question).

It's OK if the language maintainers don't agree with certain points on
the survey, but please, pretty please, *make your stance clear*. Please
don't keep silence and leave us guessing.  That's *very* detrimental to
morale, and given the current state of D, we need as much morale as we
can muster.

Communication from the leadership has been wanting all these years, and
according to my observation it has resulted in a general loss of morale,
which could explain some of the avid D users who eventually left or
otherwise stopped contributing or reduced their contribution. Given that
this is supposed to be an open source, community project, communication
is extremely important. *Especially* response to something a large
number of users raise. And by response I don't mean always agree with
the majority, but TELL US clearly where exactly the leadership stands on
important issues.

By not communicating, or by not giving clear, direct responses to issues
raised, you are (intentionally or not) sending the message that you
don't care what we think, and while you certainly have the right to do
that, it's very demoralizing and discouraging to would-be contributors.


To use a concrete example: one rather telling point from the above
linked survey is that out of 291 respondents, 210 (72%) say that they
don't use -betterC, and 69 (24%) say they only use it for experimenting
/ testing / debugging, and only a meager 12 (4%) say that their project
actively depends on it.  Given how much time and effort has been poured
into -betterC recently, it begs the question, why?  What does the
leadership think of the results of this survey?  Does it think it's time
to reconsider the amount of effort put into -betterC?  Or does it
disagree? Or does it plain not care?  PLEASE TELL US.  Personally I
couldn't care less if the leadership says "we are charging ahead with
-betterC anyway, because XYZ". But please at least TELL US.

The leadership needs to respond, and needs to respond *publicly* and
*clearly*, in official capacity, to issues like this. Preferably, in a
public, easy-to-find place so that we don't have to keep asking and
wondering.  Failure to respond, like it or not, will lead to people
assuming that the leadership just plain doesn't care. That may or may
not be true, but that's what people will assume. And we don't want that,
because it damages morale. So please, communicate with us.


T

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