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

[Manu]

On Mon, 3 Sep 2018 at 18:45, Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 17:15:03 UTC, Laurent Tréguier
> wrote:
> > 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
> >
> > The complaints I have is exactly why I'm myself maintaining
> > plugins for VSCode, Atom, and others soon. Don't worry, I still
> > think D is worth putting some time and effort into and I know
> > actions generally get more things done than words.
> > I also know that tons of stuff is yet to be done in regards to
> > the actual compilers and such.
> >
> > It just baffles me a bit to see the state of D in this
> > department, when languages like Go or Rust (hooray for yet
> > another comparison to Go and Rust) are a lot younger, but
> > already have what looks like very good tooling.
> > Then again they do have major industry players backing them
> > though...
>
> Why is Go's IDE support baffling?  It was a necessity to achieve
> Google's commercial aims, I should think.
>
> "
> The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not
> researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of
> school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably
> learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant
> language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the
> language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand
> and easy to adopt."
>   – Rob Pike
>
> I don't know the story of Rust, but if I were working on a
> project as large as Firefox I guess I would want an IDE too!
> Whereas it doesn't seem like it's so important to some of D's
> commercial users because they have a different context.
>
> I don't think it's overall baffling that D hasn't got the best
> IDE support of emerging languages.  The people that contribute to
> it, as Jonathan says, seen to be leas interested in IDEs and no
> company has found it important enough to pay someone else to work
> on it.  So far anyway but as adoption grows maybe that will
> change.

It's been a key hurdle for as long as I've been around here.
I've been saying for 10 years that no company I've ever worked at can
take D seriously without industry standard IDE support.
My feeling is that we have recently reached MVP status... that's a
huge step, 10 years in the making ;)
I think it's now at a point where more people *wouldn't* reject it on
contact than those who would. But we need to go much further to make
developers genuinely comfortable, and thereby go out of their way to
prefer using D than C++ and pitch as such to their managers.
Among all developers I've demo-ed or introduced recently, I can say
for certain that developer enthusiasm is driven by their perception of
the tooling in the order of 10x more than the language.