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

[Chris]

On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 16:55:10 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
>
> Most of the work that gets done is the stuff that the folks 
> contributing think is the most important - frequently what is 
> most important for them for what they do, and very few (if any) 
> of the major contributors use or care about IDEs for their own 
> use. And there's tons to do that has nothing to do with IDEs. 
> There are folks who care about it enough to work on it, which 
> is why projects such as VisualD exist at all, and AFAIK, they 
> work reasonably well, but the only two ways that they're going 
> to get more work done on them than is currently happening is if 
> the folks who care about that sort of thing contribute or if 
> they donate money for it to be worked on. Not long ago, the D 
> Foundation announced that they were going to use donations to 
> pay someone to work on his plugin for Visual Studio Code:
>
> https://forum.dlang.org/post/rmqvglgccmgoajmhynog@forum.dlang.org
>
> So, if you want stuff like that to get worked on, then donate 
> or pitch in.
>
> The situation with D - both with IDEs and in general - has 
> improved greatly over time even if it may not be where you want 
> it to be. But if you're ever expecting IDE support to be a top 
> priority of many of the contributors, then you're going to be 
> sorely disappointed. It's the sort of thing that we care about 
> because we care about D being successful, but it's not the sort 
> of thing that we see any value in whatsoever for ourselves, and 
> selfish as it may be, when we spend the time to contribute to 
> D, we're generally going to work on the stuff that we see as 
> having the most value for getting done what we care about. And 
> there's a lot to get done which impacts pretty much every D 
> user and not just those who want something that's IDE-related.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

Dear Jonathan, you've just said it. There is no real plan and 
only problems that someone deems interesting or challenging at a 
given moment are tackled. If they solve a problem for a lot of 
users, it's only a side effect. The advent of a D Foundation 
hasn't changed anything in this regard, and it seems not to be 
just a financial issue. It's the mentality. In other words, D is 
still unreliable, and if that what the community wants, fine, but 
instead of promoting it as a substitute for C/C++, Java etc. it 
should come with a warning label that says "D is in many parts 
still at an experimental stage and ships with no guarantees 
whatsoever. Use at your own risk." That would save both the 
language developers and (potential) users a lot of headaches.

I think this sort of misunderstanding is the source of a lot of 
friction on this forum. Some users think (or in my case: thought) 
that D will be a sound and stable language one day, a language 
they can use for loads of stuff, while the leadership prefers to 
keep it at a stage where they can test ideas to see what works 
and what doesn't, wait let me rephrase this, where the user can 
test other people's ideas with every new release.