Community Rant

[Mark via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 23 August 2017 at 23:27:22 UTC, Brad Roberts wrote:
>
>
> On 8/23/2017 3:58 PM, Mark via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> 
>> This kind of criticism comes up fairly often in the forums, 
>> maybe once every few weeks. I can link to the recent threads 
>> on the matter, but I'm sure you can make an educated guess 
>> about the responses therein. The gist of it, in my view, is 
>> that:
>> 
>> "[Making] D more approachable and attractive to people 
>> thinking of picking up the language."
>> 
>> just isn't a high priority right now.
>
> That's one way to look at it.
>
> Another, slightly more accurate and nuanced version is that 
> there are many areas for improvement, and those that are doing 
> work to improve things are doing them in areas they believe are 
> important and useful for their work.  That there's not more in 
> the area <X>, that you (and others) believe is important, 
> merely shows that the number that believe <X> is important 
> enough to work on right now is close to zero.  That doesn't 
> mean that <X> isn't also important, just that it's not at the 
> top of the priority list for those getting things done.
>
> Convince someone that <X> is higher priority than the things 
> they're working on then you might see some movement on those 
> fronts.  Or convince yourself that it's important enough to 
> engage in yourself. This isn't really a community level issue 
> so much as a very personal level issue.  It's not sufficient 
> for something to be declared a community level priority if no 
> one at the personal level is interested enough to contribute 
> their time.

That's the longer version of what I meant to say.

I don't think the concept of a community level priority has any 
meaning in this context- there is no centralized decision making 
mechanism in the D community. The "priority" I was referring to 
in my previous post is just a simple average of the personal 
priorities of language contributors.