Why is D unpopular, redux.

[FeepingCreature]

On Tuesday, 24 May 2022 at 10:22:31 UTC, burjui wrote:
> And one of the main problems, imho, is Walter himself. He's 
> like a child that wants to play with his favourite toys, e.g. 
> ImportC, but hates doing homework. That's why we have many 
> shiny new features in D, but bugs can rot their way into DMD 
> for decades. I get that behaviour, I was like that most of my 
> life. Judging from my own experience, he may even have 
> untreated ADHD. He's great at programming, but sucks at 
> leadership. And D is no longer his own toy, it's a project with 
> many people depending on it. Whatever the problem with Walter 
> is, it's outright irresponsible to have him as a leader.
>

I cannot put into words how much I disagree with this.

Rough consensus and running code! History is made by those who 
bother to show up. Patches welcome. The project is on Github, 
there is a very visible fork button on the top left. That's the 
same reason I violently disagree with the idea that D has too 
little "management." There's this idea that if we just have a 
really good idea, it will materialize developers out of nowhere 
through the sheer force of its majesty. This is not how things 
work, or have ever worked.

Walter works on DMD. This makes him part of an all-too-small 
circle of people who actually contribute to this project in any 
way whatsoever. All the disagreements I have with the project are 
the *other* way - I think it's *too cumbersome* to just jump in 
and contribute. I think we need a lot more people just jumping in 
and coding wildly ahead, and then sharing their results. An 
experimental branch? D3? Whatever must be changed to make that 
possible, I support it.

"More people need to" - Whenever you say that more people need 
to, you don't have a solution, you have a *wish.* Them needing to 
will not make people care, or exist. Want more features? Argue 
for whatever stands between *existing* people in the ecosystem 
and adding features. Want more bugfixes? Ask people why they 
don't fix bugs. Ask *yourself* why you don't fix bugs.

It is my belief that if Walter leaves D, it will die within a 
year or two. A project needs action. I think the codebase is in 
an awkwardly hard-to-maintain state for outsiders: who will fix 
it? Whether or not Walter does it, who else would?

One of the worst things a project can do is penalize 
contributions, whether through cumbersome processes, bad code, or 
excessive criticism. Opinions are plentiful; pull requests are 
scarce. It is always thus.