Why D is not a popular language?

[Paul Backus]

On Wednesday, 13 January 2021 at 06:11:14 UTC, evilrat wrote:
> On Wednesday, 13 January 2021 at 00:51:35 UTC, Marcone wrote:
>> The impression I have is that everything in D is difficult, 
>> old, obsolete and abandoned. I hope someday those responsible 
>> for D will invest in IDE, integration with Qt, and with Qt 
>> Designer to convert .ui to .d and a way to use packages that 
>> is as easy as in Python, because the dub is very bad.
>
> Welcome to the wonderful world of Open Source!
>
> Ok no time for celebrations, since unlike corporate backed 
> languages D is poor, all of those things will not happen just 
> because someone asked, it may sound harsh but "if you need it - 
> you make it, or pay someone to make it", that's what everyone 
> says on that forum. And I mean they are not wrong. For example 
> if thing X is exist in language A and thing Y is super easy to 
> use that's because someone had to make it happen, and when 
> nobody wants to make those nasty things the last argument is 
> money, which you already probably guessed D lacks.

This is all true, but the fact remains that some open source 
projects do a better job of working with contributors than others.

D's leadership is almost legendarily bad at communicating openly 
and effectively with contributors, and the result is that despite 
having a community full of skilled and motivated developers, 
progress on important projects is often slow to nonexistent. The 
most recent example of this is Timon Gehr's tuple DIP, which is 
currently stalled due to "lack of enthusiasm from decision 
makers." [1] When someone like Timon shows up to volunteer his 
time and skills for your project, how arrogant and/or incompetent 
do you have to be to essentially slam the door in his face?

People talk about "lack of volunteers," but the truth is that D 
*vastly* under-utilizes the volunteer resources it has already. 
That's the bottleneck in the current system, and that's what 
needs to be fixed if we want D to continue growing.

[1] https://forum.dlang.org/post/rsrlkq$1nu0$1@digitalmars.com