Being Positive

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, February 13, 2018 03:15:44 bachmeier via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> I don't see a negative trend. It's always been negative around
> here, and I've never understood why. It's the best language I've
> used by a significant margin. D is the inverse of the Lisp
> community, which believes the Common Lisp Hyperspec was delivered
> on stone tablets.

I recall at least one conversation at a previous dconf about how it seemed
like users of other languages like Go tended to get really ticked at you if
you said anything bad about their language, whereas the D folks tended to
trash their own language. One suggestion was that it was a good sign,
because it showed that we felt secure enough about the language to be
willing to complain about it rather than feeling that we had to defend its
every flaw. I suspect that part of it is that a lot of folks seem to come to
D looking for the perfect language after having be frustrated by another
language like C++, and while D is a lot closer to that for many folks than
other languages are, it still has plenty of flaws, and we want those flaws
fixed so that it can become the perfect language. Obviously, that's not
going to happen. No language is perfect, but the vocal portion of the D
community does have a tendency to want to push for everything that's
arguably wrong with D to be fixed, and that can result in a lot of
negativity, but it can also result in things getting fixed (though that
requires actually doing something about it rather than just complaining).

Sometimes, many of us do seem to lose sight of the fact that even though D
isn't always where we want it to be, it's far closer than the languages that
we came from, and it's awesome even if it's not necessarily as awesome as it
theoretically could be.

- Jonathan M Davis