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

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Tuesday, 4 September 2018 at 05:38:49 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> On 4 September 2018 at 04:19, Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d 
> <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>> On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 16:07:21 UTC, RhyS wrote:
>>>
>>> A good example being the resources going into DMD, LDC, 
>>> GDC... 3 Compilers for one language, when even well funded 
>>> languages stick to one compiler. And now some people think 
>>> its a good idea to have DMD also cross compile because "its 
>>> not hard to do". No, maybe not but who will do all the 
>>> testing, what resources are going to spend when things do not 
>>> work for some users ( and the negative impact on their 
>>> experience )... Its a long list but people do not look past 
>>> this. It sounds like fun, lets think / or do it.
>>
>>
>> What resources do you think go into GDC?  I think Iain would 
>> love to hear about all these resources because I am not sure 
>> he has been made aware of them because they don't exist beyond 
>> him and possibly a tiny number of others helping in part at 
>> certain stages.
>>
>
> *Looks behind self*
>
> *Looks under desk*
>
> *Looks under keyboard*
>
> There must be resources somewhere, but none appear to be within 
> reach. :-)

If Iain had a beer for every person that complained about the 
effort spent by team GDC without having first thanked him and his 
vast team then...

People are sometimes quite disconnected from reality.  At least I 
have no other explanation for people demanding others do this or 
do that without doing the minimum necessary to make it appealing 
for others to work on it.  I mean my experience is that you can 
pay people a lot of money and ask them beforehand do you want to 
work on X, and it's no guarantee they actually will be willing to 
when it comes to it.  Programmers in general can be very 
independent-minded people, and if somebody is looking for 
especially meek and compliant people then if you have come to the 
D forums you are in the wrong place!

One can be much more persuasive with positive words than 
complaints.  Most people are well aware of that so if they are 
complaining it's in my judgement because they want to complain.  
People with high standards will do that when they feel powerless. 
  I'm not talking here about notorious highly intelligent trolls 
like Ola and sock-puppets who never seem to actually write code 
in D.

But nobody who can keep up here is powerless.

It's possible to change the world you know, and from the most 
unpromising start.  Forget about what's realistic, and focus on 
what you want to achieve.  Believe me, you can achieve an awful 
lot from the most unpromising start.

People talk about how most people are not super-hackers and one 
shouldn't expect them to manage without polish.  Well hacker is a 
state of mind,a way of being in the world.  Ask Iain if his 
self-conception is as a super-hacker with l33t skillz that a mere 
professional programmer couldn't match and you might be surprised 
(I think his self-conception might be wrong, but that's Dunning 
Kruger in action for you).

It's really much more about values and virtues then capabilities. 
  Are you able to tolerate discomfort and the accurate initial 
feeling of conscious incompetence?  Because that's what real 
learning feels like once you leave the spoon-feeding stream of 
education.

D is a gift to the world from Walter, Andrei, and those who 
contributed after it was begun.  Just demanding people do stuff 
for you without doing anything to contribute back - that's not 
how life works.

I don't think I have ever seen this degree of a feeling of 
entitlement in my life! And I've been working in finance since 
1993.

If doesn't want to pay money towards the development of IDE 
integration, doesn't want to do any work themselves, then the 
least they could do is draw up a feature list of what's missing 
and find a way to help from time to time with the organisation of 
the work.

That's the only way things ever get done anyway.

Have you noticed how the documentation has gotten much better?  
Runnable examples too.  Did that happen because people 
complained?  No - it happened because Seb Wilzbach (and maybe 
others) took the initiative to make it happen and did the work 
themselves.

A little money goes a long way in open source.  So if you're a 
company and you're complaining and not donating money to the 
Foundation then what exactly do you expect?  We have a few 
support contracts with MongoDB (a choice made before I got 
involved) and the legal fees alone were 20k and we pay about 30k 
USD a year.  If a few companies contributed at that scale to the 
Foundation that's at least a couple of full-time developers.

And if you disagree with Andrei and Walter choices about 
priorities you know you can just direct where the money should be 
spent as we are with SAoC.