Handling constructive criticism

[Sean Kelly]

== Quote from Jason House (jason.james.house at gmail.com)'s article
> I feel like I'm seeing a pattern with how constructive criticism in handled.  Periodically, somebody will take the time to
construct these long laundry lists of issues they have with D (the language, the libraries, the community, whatever), and a long
thread of discussion ensues.
...
> The latter one did spawn website updates, but I don't really think anything came out of the rest of the discussions.  Maybe
I'm wrong and there's something behind the scenes, but the perception is that nothing happened.

This is basically where Tango came from.  After years of people lamenting about the situation
with Phobos, a few members of the community decided that the only way things were going
to change is if we did it ourselves--that was Ares.  Sadly, community participation faded fairly
quickly until I was left as the sole contributor and de facto owner of the project.  After a year
or so of this, Kris and I basically came to the consensus that there was precious little chance
of future community involvement and so we decided to start fresh with Tango, following
design goals that emerged from our experience with Ares as well as Mango.

Please note that I'm not saying this to shift the focus of the discussion onto Tango so much
as to provide evidence that, for better or worse, your observations have always been true
of D and the only way we've found to change things is to do it ourselves.  Unfortunately,
because the language has a BDFL there's nothing to be done on that front but build a
new compiler, and assuming that forking the language is a bad thing, hope that BDFL
doesn't make any language changes that the community dislikes.

I'm sorry if this sounds a bit defeatist, but in my defense it's a defeatism that's been born
out of experience.  Insofar as the D language itself is concerned, it's largely a "take it or
leave it" situation.


Sean