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

[Ecstatic Coder]

On Thursday, 23 August 2018 at 03:50:44 UTC, Shachar Shemesh 
wrote:
> On 22/08/18 21:34, Ali wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 22 August 2018 at 17:42:56 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>> Pretty positive overall, and the negatives he mentions are 
>>> fairly obvious to anyone paying attention.
>> 
>> Yea, I agree, the negatives are not really negative
>> 
>> Walter not matter how smart he is, he is one man who can work 
>> on the so many things at the same time
>> 
>> Its a chicken and egg situation, D needs more core 
>> contributors, and to get more contributors it needs more 
>> users, and to get more users it need more core contributors
>> 
>
> No, no and no.
>
> I was holding out on replying to this thread to see how the 
> community would react. The vibe I'm getting, however, is that 
> the people who are seeing D's problems have given up on 
> affecting change.
>
> It is no secret that when I joined Weka, I was a sole D 
> detractor among a company quite enamored with the language. I 
> used to have quite heated water cooler debates about that point 
> of view.
>
> Every single one of the people rushing to defend D at the time 
> has since come around. There is still some debate on whether, 
> points vs. counter points, choosing D was a good idea, but the 
> overwhelming consensus inside Weka today is that D has *fatal* 
> flaws and no path to fixing them.
>
> And by "fatal", I mean literally flaws that are likely to 
> literally kill the language.
>
> And the thing that brought them around is not my power of 
> persuasion. The thing that brought them around was spending a 
> couple of years working with the language on an every-day basis.
>
> And you will notice this in the way Weka employees talk on this 
> forum: except me, they all disappeared. You used to see Idan, 
> Tomer and Eyal post here. Where are they?
>
> This forum is hostile to criticism, and generally tries to keep 
> everyone using D the same way. If you're cutting edge D, the 
> forum is almost no help at all. Consensus among former posters 
> here is that it is generally a waste of time, so almost 
> everyone left, and those who didn't, stopped posting.
>
> And it's not just Weka. I've had a chance to talk in private to 
> some other developers. Quite a lot have serious, fundamental 
> issues with the language. You will notice none of them speaks 
> up on this thread.
>
> They don't see the point.
>
> No technical project is born great. If you want a technical 
> project to be great, the people working on it have to focus on 
> its *flaws*. The D's community just doesn't do that.
>
> To sum it up: fatal flaws + no path to fixing + no push from 
> the community = inevitable eventual death.
>
> With great regrets,
> Shachar

Same feeling here btw.

I regularly have to face strange bugs while updating the compiler 
or its libraries.

For instance, my Resync tool used to work fine both on Windows 
and Linux.

But it seems that the latest version of "std.file.copy" now 
completely ignores the "PreserveAttributes.no" argument on 
Windows, which made recent Windows builds of Resync fail on 
read-only files.

Very typical...

While D remains my favorite file scripting language, I must admit 
that this is quite disappointing for such an old language, 
compared to similar languages like Crystal.