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

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Saturday, 1 September 2018 at 12:33:49 UTC, rjframe wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Aug 2018 15:35:45 +0000, Joakim wrote:
>
>>> * Language complexity
>>>
>>> Raise your hand if you know how a class with both opApply and 
>>> the
>>> get/next/end functions behaves when you pass it to foreach.
>>> How about a struct? Does it matter if it allows copying or 
>>> not?
>>>
>>> The language was built because C++ was deemed too complex! 
>>> Please see the thread about lazy [1] for a case where a 
>>> question actually has an answer, but nobody seems to know it 
>>> (and the person who does know it is hard pressed to explain 
>>> the nuance that triggers this).
>> 
>> By this rationale, C++ should be dead by now. Why do you think 
>> it's fatal to D?
>
> It's worth noting that C++ isn't always chosen for its 
> technical merits. It's a well-known language whose more or less 
> standard status in certain domains means it's the default 
> choice; C++ is sometimes used for projects in which Stroustrup 
> would say it's obviously the wrong language for the job.
>
> D is far more likely to require justification based on 
> technical merit. If D becomes another C++, why bother taking a 
> chance with D when you can just use C++, use a well-supported, 
> commonly-used compiler, and hire from a bigger pool of 
> jobseekers?

That's why the people that adopt D will inordinately be 
principals not agents in the beginning. They will either be 
residual claimants on earnings or will have acquired the 
authority to make decisions without persuading a committee that 
makes decisions on the grounds of social factors.

If D becomes another C++ ?  C++ was ugly from the beginning (in 
my personal subjective assessment) whereas D was designed by 
people with good taste.

That's why it appeals inordinately to people with good taste.

In Hong Kong we had some difficulty hiring a support person for a 
trading floor.  Spoke in some cases to the most senior person in 
HK for even large and well-known funds (small office in this 
case) and they simply were not good enough.  Thanks to someone 
from the D community I met a headhunter who used to be at Yandex 
but realized the money was better as a headhunter.

They don't have many financial clients I think, don't have 
connections on the talent side in finance.  But the runners up 
were by far better than anyone we had found through other sources 
and the best was outstanding.

Good job, I said.  It's funny that the person we hired came from 
a big bank when other headhunters are looking in the same place 
and know that world better.  By the way, how many people did you 
interact with to find X ?  In London if a headhunter puts 10 
people before you and you are really pretty happy then that's a 
good day.  He said two hundred !  And they had to come up with a 
hiring test too.

So the basic reason they could find good people in technology in 
finance when others couldn't is that they have much better taste.

Do you see ?  The others knew many more people, they had 
experience doing it, and somebody who had to persuade a committee 
would have found it hard to justify.

Programming ability follows a Pareto curve - see the best and the 
rest.  There might be many more C++, Python and C# programmers.  
The incidence of outstanding ones is lower than in the D 
community for the very reason that only someone obtuse or very 
smart will learn D for career reasons - intrinsic motivation 
draws the highest talent.

It depends if your model of people doing work is an army of 
intelligent trained monkeys or a force made up  of small elite 
groups of the best people you have ever worked with.  Of course 
the general of the trained monkey army is going to be difficult 
to persuade.  And so ?

On the other hand, someone who is smart and has good taste and 
has earned the right to decide - D is a less popular language 
that has fewer tutorials and less shiny IDE and debugger support. 
  Well if you're a small company and you are directly or in effect 
a proxy owner of the residual (ie an owner of some kind) it's a 
pragmatic question and saying nobody got fired for buying IBM - 
that's missing the point because the success is yours and the 
failure is yours and you can't pass the buck.

The beauty of being the underdog is that it's easy to succeed.  
You don't need to be the top dog, and in fact it's not 
strategically wise to do something that might think you stand a 
chance - let them think what they want.  The underdog just needs 
to keep improving and keep getting more adoption, which I don't 
have much doubt is happening.

Modern people can be like children in their impatience sometimes!

I've only been programming since 1983 so I had the benefit of 
high level languages like BBC BASIC, C, a Forth I wrote myself, 
and Modula 3.  And although I had to write a disassembler at 
least I has assemblers built in.  Programming using a hex keypad 
is not that satisfying after a while.  It takes a long time to 
develop a language, its ecosystem and community.

An S curve is quite flat in the beginning.  D is a very ambitious 
language so of course in any one domain it seems like nobody is 
using it, but this is deceptive.  It isn't like Go where its more 
used for a particular purpose.

Anyone that thinks they are a strong programmer by comparison 
with others in their world and can keep up here and would like to 
write D should contact me (if you can't see my email then Michael 
Parker will have it).  And if the same but they would like to 
write C#, Python or Julia then that also applies.

Dicebot wrote in the old post that triggered this discussion 
something that people interpreted as meaning he was leaving D.  
Around the same time as his old post was discovered he released 
his version of dtoh that he intends to be integrated into the 
compiler.  So he may or may not have changed his mind about 
making upstream contributions but this is something pretty close 
to that even if it's not the same.

It's not for me to say, but I believe he continues to work in D 
professionally also.

It would be wonderful if we could get back to figuring out what 
constructive steps we could take to make a better world.  People 
who make predictions should back their views with something - 
they should have skin in the game.  If someone wants to make a 
prediction about D I am happy to take the other side of a wager 
if I disagree strongly.  I play for high stakes - usually cups of 
coffee.  I have a bet with my economist that there won't be 
another referendum about whether to leave or soft Vs hard before 
we leave the EU.  I win two coffees if no referendum and lose one 
if there is.  Since it takes six months to prepare the question 
and Brexit date is March, I think that's not bad for me.