Does D have any political goals?

[Karmello]

On Monday, 7 November 2022 at 05:30:20 UTC, thebluepandabear 
wrote:
> (If this message is off-topic/disallowed I apologize dearly, 
> and please feel free to remove this post if this is the case.)
>
> Hello guys,
>
> I have been programming for a couple of years in various 
> different languages. A couple of weeks ago I decided that I 
> would like to learn a new language, so I went ahead and began 
> learning Rust.
>
> Immediately I realized how toxic, egostic, and rude the Rust 
> community was, and this made me very uncomfortable as when I 
> learn new languages I often love to be a part of the community 
> and interact with fellow programmers.
>
> After that, I began to learn about all of the social 
> justice/political statements that Rust was putting out over the 
> last couple of years in regards to topics unrelated to 
> programming, this made me feel very uncomfortable -- not 
> necessarily because I disagreed with what they were saying (in 
> fact I agreed with most statements), but mostly because I felt 
> like  politics shouldn't be involved in a programming language.
>
> Eventually I gave up on Rust, I simply couldn't ignore these 
> two issues that I had with the community and the core team. 
> Rust had the right to make political statements, but I had the 
> right not to use a language if that was the case.
>
> For the next couple of days I was trying very hard to find an 
> apolitical language to learn instead of Rust, and I stumbled 
> across D. D seemed like a good language to learn and I saw that 
> the community was EXTREMELY nice, although I am not sure 
> whether D is an apolitical language (or whether they have been 
> involved politically).
>
> I am just here asking whether or not D will keep politics out 
> of programming, et cetera, and look -- if D is political then I 
> have absolutely no issue, in fact I respect this decision 
> completely. It's just that when politics gets involved in 
> programming it puts me off instantly, so that's why I asked.
>
> Answers would be appreciated :D
>
> Regards,
> thebluepandabear

D is pretty neutral and I guess that is one of the few good 
things about it. The major issue with D is that the active 
participants and leadership refuse to bring D up to modern 
programming user interaction standards. D is pretty much dead. I 
use it only to write small utilities and maintain old programs. 
The language itself is pretty good and better than C and C++ by 
far.... but almost everything else is extremely lacking. Visual D 
does a decent job of providing an IDE but basically the 
leadership doesn't care about modernizing D(or maybe they don't 
know how but I'm pretty sure they no longer have the desire to 
push them in to working those long nights and to drive things and 
it has effectively killed D).

I've moved on to F#/C# and back to using .net. I stopped using 
.net for a while and learned D and liked D a lot as a 
language(one of the best) but almost everything else was a total 
drag on the experience. While individuals may experience things 
differently depending on their preferences D is more of a systems 
language that should generally be only used for very small 
projects unless there is a budget and motivation to use it for 
larger things.

My years in the forums never had political issues and maybe a a 
handful arguments about politics as someone said something. Most 
arguments were over the future of D... in fact, that was mainly 
the posts about D and the arguments. I haven't paid attention 
much in the last few years but it seems like D hasn't made any 
meaningful progress since then which is what I expect and I 
expect in 10 years it will be the same. The same die hard people 
who love D no matter what and/or believe it will take off. At 
some point the leadership will die off(and before that) and D 
will die along with it. Maybe someone will take it over but it is 
unlikely to ever get anywhere. It is clear the leadership killed 
D(which is usually how these things go) and it's quite sad. 
People tried to talk sense in to the leadership but they didn't 
want to have anything to do with actually making it happen.

This will be your real problem with D. When you put in the effort 
to learn it then realize that it's essentially a dead end. It is 
more like it is a beautiful detour where some guys about a 
quarter of the way are blocking off the road preventing anyone 
from going any further. Or maybe better: about a quarter of the 
way the road has washed out and the "government" refuses to let 
anyone repair it because of "reasons" or "We are working on it".