We are forking D

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sun, Jan 07, 2024 at 04:43:17PM +0000, Lance Bachmeier via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> I'd much rather Adam put his time into a fork, rather than the more
> common approach where he'd post here under various names, make
> ridiculous claims, and vandalize the discussions. If you're new, you
> may not have seen the many posts from someone that doesn't like
> private at the module level.

Are you sure you have your facts straight? AFAIK the pseudonymous trolls
who posted about private or this or that complaint were not Adam, they
were some other disgruntled former D user who has since left.  AFAIK
Adam has never engaged in such tactics and was in close contact with the
core D team until the recent spat (which is the culmination of ongoing
disagreements on governance that started more recently).


> Whether there are useful insights from this or any other fork will
> depend on what they do with it. If there's too much incompatibility of
> code, due to breaking changes, it won't have much effect. There's
> already Nim, Rust, Go, Zig, etc., to compare with and the forks will
> in each case be just another language.

Adam has stated (publicly, in the opendlang github discussions) that he
does not plan to make major changes to the language that would massively
break compatibility.  But of course, if this fork continues
independently then over time things will diverge sooner or later.


> > > 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.
> 
> Not really. Those things come after the userbase gets large. I was
> using Python in the 1990s and I can assure you that the growth did not
> come because of good tooling, documentation, or code samples.
> Similarly, I was using R when you used Emacs or a plain text editor,
> the documentation was similar to Linux man pages, and you asked
> questions on a mailing list with Brian Ripley. Only after it took off
> did they build RStudio. What both languages had was a small, dedicated
> group of users that were willing and able to build useful things with
> the language.

As somebody has said, it depends on your definition of "success".  If
your definition of success is popularity, then sure, you need a big
community, lots of existing code, hype, etc..  By that measure C++ is
more successful than D and I should be using C++ instead.  But I came to
D not because of popularity, but because of technical merit.  I would
rather stay with a small, relatively unknown community where technical
excellence plays a deciding role, than in a large community of
mediocrity where popularity is the deciding factor.  So my definition of
success is rather different from what some have been using when
bemoaning the current state of D.


T

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