Feedback on Átila's Vision for D

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Wednesday, 16 October 2019 at 23:37:47 UTC, welkam wrote:
> Now I have been lurking here and on reddit for a few years and 
> recently I noticed a lot of new people complaining about

Get real. Most programmers never read forums. I've never read 
forums on the languages I use the most. I stay productive, I 
don't want to talk about how things can be fixed when I can 
easily find ways to move around the issues I face. People pick up 
languages because they have a project (maybe a hobby project). 
They want to be productive.

When hitting a language issue in other languages I do this:
1. search stack overflow and find solution in 10 seconds.
2. read documentation and find solution in 1-30 minutes.
3. search github and find solution in 15-120 minutes
4. find a tutorial and go through it (1+ hours)

If I have to do this:
5. ask on forums and wait for hours/days.
6. submit an issue on github and wait for weeks, months or years.

Then I put that language in the drawer and stick with the other 
options. Most people do.

So if people are active in forums there are many reasons for it, 
of course, but people often starts lurking because they want to 
know if the roadblocks they are experiencing will be fixed, and 
chime in to see if it is possible to do something about it.

But yeah, going ad hominem (like you just did) is never a good 
idea. Fortunately there appears to be much less of it now, but 
I've in the past, time and time again, seen very knowledgable 
people who obviously have a background in CS go silent after 
being hit over the head with a stick.

One thing Rust did right was moderating personal conflicts. As 
you can see from their forums, they have many people with a solid 
formal background that can move their eco system forward. Do 
people gripe about Rust in the Rust forums, yes, but they also 
knew what they were getting into as Rust always was all about the 
most "problematic" feature, the borrow checker. It was always 
front and center.

What has been marketed as D's front-and-center has changed over 
time and therefore people come to it with very different 
expectations. Which makes things more contentious.

Many discussions seem to struggle with this. Is D an alternative 
to C++ or is it in alternative to Python?

It cannot be both, yet it is, and is not, so that is basically an 
inherent struggle that cannot be resolved.

Thus this social dynamic will linger on...