We are forking D

[Don Allen]

On Sunday, 7 January 2024 at 11:54:16 UTC, bomat wrote:
> On Thursday, 4 January 2024 at 03:12:48 UTC, Don Allen wrote:
[snip]

>> That D hasn't taken over the world is beside the point; good 
>> things aren't always popular, e.g., Scheme, and sometimes bad 
>> things are very popular, e.g., Windows, JavaScript, C/C++.
>
> Now this is the point where I have to totally disagree with 
> you. It doesn't suffice for a system to be well designed and 
> great to use "in theory", there must also be tooling, 
> documentation, thousands if not millions of samples, and an 
> active community.

I said nothing about good tooling, documentation, etc. Of 
*course* those are necessary for something to be "good", which 
I'd point out, was *my* definition of "good", as "My opinions, of 
course" was intended to convey.

> Otherwise it will not feel safe to embrace it - certainly not 
> for companies, but to a lesser extent for every single 
> developer.
> If you look at your list of examples again - regardless if you 
> deem them "good" or "bad" - this is something that every single 
> one of them has, and which their competitors *don't*.
> If you google for a problem/question you have with any of the 
> mentioned things, you are *very likely* to find a viable 
> solution.
>
> In short, in order for something to be successful, it already 
> has to be successful. This is a paradox that has been written 
> about a lot and by much smarter people than me, and it is 
> mysterious to most why some few projects have achieved to get 
> over this hump while millions of others haven't.

It all depends on how you define "successful". If you define 
success as having a huge user community, then your paragraph 
above applies. I would argue that there are alternative ways to 
measure success. Is Scheme a success? OpenBSD? JS Bach? I say 
emphatically "yes" (especially regarding Bach) and yet all of 
them have user communities orders of magnitude smaller than their 
most popular competitors.

>
> This brings me back to the beginning of my post where I 
> lamented the split of an already niche language. Again, I hope 
> that the motto "unity is strength" does not apply in this case 
> and that everyone keeps open minded enough to profit from each 
> other.