D is dead (was: Dicebot on leaving D: It is anarchy driven development in all its glory.)

[Everlast]

On Thursday, 23 August 2018 at 03:50:44 UTC, Shachar Shemesh 
wrote:
> On 22/08/18 21:34, Ali wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 22 August 2018 at 17:42:56 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>> Pretty positive overall, and the negatives he mentions are 
>>> fairly obvious to anyone paying attention.
>> 
>> Yea, I agree, the negatives are not really negative
>> 
>> Walter not matter how smart he is, he is one man who can work 
>> on the so many things at the same time
>> 
>> Its a chicken and egg situation, D needs more core 
>> contributors, and to get more contributors it needs more 
>> users, and to get more users it need more core contributors
>> 
>
> No, no and no.
>
> I was holding out on replying to this thread to see how the 
> community would react. The vibe I'm getting, however, is that 
> the people who are seeing D's problems have given up on 
> affecting change.
>
> It is no secret that when I joined Weka, I was a sole D 
> detractor among a company quite enamored with the language. I 
> used to have quite heated water cooler debates about that point 
> of view.
>
> Every single one of the people rushing to defend D at the time 
> has since come around. There is still some debate on whether, 
> points vs. counter points, choosing D was a good idea, but the 
> overwhelming consensus inside Weka today is that D has *fatal* 
> flaws and no path to fixing them.
>
> And by "fatal", I mean literally flaws that are likely to 
> literally kill the language.
>
> And the thing that brought them around is not my power of 
> persuasion. The thing that brought them around was spending a 
> couple of years working with the language on an every-day basis.
>
> And you will notice this in the way Weka employees talk on this 
> forum: except me, they all disappeared. You used to see Idan, 
> Tomer and Eyal post here. Where are they?
>
> This forum is hostile to criticism, and generally tries to keep 
> everyone using D the same way. If you're cutting edge D, the 
> forum is almost no help at all. Consensus among former posters 
> here is that it is generally a waste of time, so almost 
> everyone left, and those who didn't, stopped posting.
>
> And it's not just Weka. I've had a chance to talk in private to 
> some other developers. Quite a lot have serious, fundamental 
> issues with the language. You will notice none of them speaks 
> up on this thread.
>
> They don't see the point.
>
> No technical project is born great. If you want a technical 
> project to be great, the people working on it have to focus on 
> its *flaws*. The D's community just doesn't do that.
>
> To sum it up: fatal flaws + no path to fixing + no push from 
> the community = inevitable eventual death.
>
> With great regrets,
> Shachar


I agree with this. I no longer program in D, except for minor 
things, because of this type of approach. D, as a language, is 
the best. D as an actual practical tool is a deadly pit of 
snakes... anyone of which can bite you, and that won't stop the 
others. Of course, in the pit is where all the gold is at...

D's ecosystem is the problem, not the language(although, the bugs 
in the implementation are a problem, they seem to be generally 
solved and since the source is open it can be fixed when needed).

It is obviously the mentalities of the leaders... it always is, 
that is why they are called leaders, because they lead and 
whatever mentalities they have will shape who and what they lead.

It would be amazing to see someone like Microsoft implement a D#! 
That would be a very impressive language and ecosystem! Specially 
if it had both .net and native compilation and fixed some of the 
major language issues D has.

My feeling is D is and will stay stagnate for the majority of the 
world. It doesn't seem to have enough momentum to break out and 
the "leaders" don't seem to know much about actually leading... 
programming? Yes, but leading? No, not really...(obviously they 
know something but I'm talking about what is required... a bill 
gate like character, say, not that we want another one of those!)

D is one of those language where it's always something getting in 
the way of zoning. Something really little and stupid but 
constantly trips you up... it becomes a big drag after while. I'd 
rather program in a language that has it's shit together where I 
can write large projects in a 10th of the time and with a fourth 
of the trouble.

Since time is money, you know these types of issues will stop 
businesses from adopting D. The typical answer from the D 
community is "Implement it in a library!" or "It has bindings!" 
as if these are the solutions someone trying to get shit done 
wants to hear. Usually the libraries are defunct in some way(bit 
rot, version issues, shitty design, some deal breaker(e.g., uses 
gc), shitty documentation, etc).

Since D is mainly community driven, this means that the community 
will cobble shit together and then it becomes part of D. This is 
good for shear amount of code generation but terrible for unity 
of design. Everyone does it their way which results in many 
different approaches to many different things(and this even gets 
in the libraries and compiler design).

There has to be a sense of balance in anything, and this includes 
leadership, compiler design, language features, etc... D does not 
have that balance and people recognize that in whatever way they 
see it and generally choose not to use it. The people that use it 
have a defacto need to project D as a balanced language(oh, it 
has this this and that! It has this and that and that over there 
too if you jump through hoops A B and C).  Very few people have 
the intelligence to be able to admit they are going down the 
wrong path and it's time to turn around. It's human nature to dig 
and dig and dig and dig and dig and dig...