Has D failed? ( unpopular opinion but I think yes )

[Timon Gehr]

On 12.04.19 20:13, Nierjerson wrote:
> ... I said that if you only support the language 
> features that you use then it is selfishness. [...]
> 

And I have in fact added some compiler features that I'll most likely 
never use myself. But I won't go ahead and sink >1k hours into a spare 
time project (e.g. IDE) that I don't primarily care for. If that's 
selfish, then everyone is selfish. If everyone works on something that 
is missing and they care about enough, then everything that someone 
cares about enough will eventually get worked on. Having people who 
don't care about certain things work on them while they have other 
things to do is just bad resource allocation. Furthermore, you need to 
have a strange notion of "selfishness" to think that sharing your work 
is selfish just because you happened to work on something that benefits 
yourself in addition to others.

> ...
>> It's fine, not great, but better than would-be competitors for my 
>> current use cases.
> 
> My point above. For YOU. You care less about other users and their use 
> cases. D is fine for you, so why do you want to keep it bad for others 

That's a loaded question, and it is bullshit.

> rather than help it work for them too? That is very selfish.
> ...

And demanding that others work on your problems for free is not?

> 
>>
>>> then why would you not want it to be more popular?
>>
>> When everything else is the same, having more users is a liability.
> 
> True, but one can make such blanket statements about everything. It's 
> nonsensical in practice because nothing can ever be the same. The amount 
> of manhours that are invested in D is proportional to the "popularity". 
> By forcing everything else the same you remove that condition and so it 
> then becomes pointless.
> 
> This isn't a business selling things

You mean like, demanding money to compensate for invested time and 
resources spent on someone else's problems? How selfish.

> ... There isn't a 
> trade off here with D's community.

Well, clearly you are trying to tell someone to do something 
differently. It's unlikely to have no cost. (Otherwise you could just do 
it yourself instead of wasting time writing long forum posts, hoping 
that other people will do as you say.)

> The larger the community the more 
> investment those people put in to D and that helps D as a language and 
> compiler grow and that helps everyone that uses it and draws in more 
> people who invest more time.
> ...

There can also be more users without there being more people working on 
open-source projects. It seems that the people who complain about D in 
the forums in the fashion you are doing are rarely active contributors.

> 
>> In any case, if you want to invest time and effort into a marketing 
>> campaign, be my guest. I'm not actively opposed to popularity, even 
>> though it would probably further diminish the average quality of 
>> discourse on the forums.
> 
> Popularity automatically does not cause problems. It is the state of the 
> human race that causes the problems. If the logic is "We don't want D 
> popular because it will cause problems in the forums" then D is shooting 
> itself in the head.

That is literally the opposite of the statement I made, but fine.

> There are ways to alleviate such problems so one 
> doesn't have to sacrifice one for the other.
> ...

Even if so, you will sacrifice some third thing.