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

[Chris]

On Sunday, 2 September 2018 at 12:07:17 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:

>
> 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.
>
[snip]

Be that as it may, however, you forget the fact that people "with 
good taste" who have (had) an intrinsic motivation to learn D are 
also very critical people who take no bs, else they wouldn't have 
ended up using D in the first place. Since they've already 
learned a lot of concepts etc. with D over the years, it's 
technically easy for them to move on to either an easier language 
or one that offers more or less the same features as D. So once 
they're no longer happy with the way things are, they can dive 
into a any language fast enough for the cost of transition to be 
low.

One has to be practical too. Programming involves more than just 
features and concepts. Good, out of the box system integration 
(e.g. Android, iOS) is important too and he who ignores this 
simple truth will have to pay a high price. That's why developers 
of new languages are so keen on giving users a smooth experience 
when it comes to app development and cross compilation which 
leads me to the next point: IDEs.

No. You don't need an IDE to develop in D. However, an IDE can a) 
make coding comfortable and b) boost your productivity. As to a): 
maybe you just grow tired of the text editor & cli approach and 
you just want to click a few buttons to fix imports or correct 
typos and be done with it, and as to b): all this helps to boost 
your productivity, especially when you can easily set up an app 
or a web service with a few mouse clicks. In D, if you want to do 
something with ARM/Android you will invariably end up with a 
potpourri of build scripts and spaghetti lines full of compiler 
flags etc. Not smooth, it takes a lot of time to set it up 
manually and it's not easily maintainable. Doable, yes, but just 
because something is doable doesn't mean it's recommendable nor 
that people will actually bother with doing it. I'm under the 
impression that the D Foundation doesn't pay much attention to 
these things once they are kind of "doable" and somebody has 
volunteered to "look into it" with no guarantee whatsoever if and 
when it will be available to users. And if there are complaints, 
hey, it is not "official" ask the guy who's looking into it. Not 
very professional. See, that doesn't really give you confidence 
in D and it gives you an uneasy feeling. Nothing worse in 
software development than to be programming thinking "Am I 
actually wasting my time here?", and of course, you become 
reluctant to start anything new in D - which is only natural.