Handling constructive criticism

[Jason House]

Sean Kelly Wrote:

> == 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.


I'm sure there are many people in the D community that are happy you guys did that!   



> 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 don't mind Walter being our benevolent dictator, but I do hope that he'll proactively pursue help and delegate responsibility.


> 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.

Maybe with continued effort, things will change :)  Maybe one day I'll join you with your defeatist attitude, but I'm not there yet...