Had another 48hr game jam this weekend...

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 02/09/13 14:51, Dicebot wrote:
> But do you seriously expect anyone with no personal business interest to work on
> brining more of such crap into something that is not broken? You would have had
> my sympathy but demand "Let's force everyone to use IDE" is just insane. All
> this thread would have made some sense if some enterprise D entity has existed
> but it simply does not work that way right now. And, to be honest, I am glad
> about it.

Personally I find, observing a number of different open source projects, that a 
very typical problem is a kind of "selection bias" among contributors that leads 
them to significantly under-appreciate the usability problems of their software.

It goes something like this: anyone who has spent any length of time using that 
software (which of course includes most contributors) either had a workflow and 
toolchain that the software matched with, or they have been able to adapt their 
workflow and toolchain to enable them to use the software.  Usually they have 
managed to find ways of coping and working around any other usability issues 
that arise.  And that situation then compounds itself over time because new 
users come and either adapt in the same way that existing contributors have, or 
they leave.

So, you wind up with a body of contributors who often have much in common in 
terms of their setup, their perception of the priorities, and in their ability 
to handle the software.  And that in turn can be very dangerous, because you get 
people who simply don't understand (or have any way to experience) problems that 
are brought to them by new users or by others.

And of course there are always greater problems than usability, so those 
problems are the ones that get focused on, with the developers all the while 
bemoaning the lack of manpower and wondering why it is so difficult to attract 
and hold on to contributors.

The only way that I can see to avoid that trap is to have a strong focus on 
usability as part of your development process, to make sure that developers have 
good connections with a diverse range of potential users and their experiences, 
and (where possible) for developers to dedicate part of their time to actually 
trying to undergo that experience themselves.

The TL;DR of what I'm saying here is: while it's certainly crazy to force D 
contributors to use IDEs, there's a great deal of value in making sure that a 
good number of contributors regularly get IDE experience, and regularly try out 
"fresh start" installs of D in IDE and non-IDE environments, because that way 
you have a sense of how easy or painful it is for new users to get things 
installed and just get hacking.