Why do you continue to use D?

[aberba]

On Thursday, 11 June 2020 at 18:00:51 UTC, Meta wrote:
> On Thursday, 11 June 2020 at 13:18:58 UTC, Jesse Phillips wrote:
>> I think D is fine for the scripts we tend to have and if every 
>> was fluent/enjoying D, I could see time taken to implement 
>> something in D. But I'm working with QA and developers which 
>> don't appear to be doing it for the joys of programming.
>
> Good point. It's been said many times before, but the people 
> who use D the most and post on this mailing list are a 
> self-selected group that, by definition, are outside the norm.

I don't think the core team wants it to remain this way. Unless D 
is fine staying this way for another 10yrs. By then we'll all be 
gone.


> That will be the case until/unless D becomes a mainstream 
> language with a better reason to use it than "it's a fun 
> language to program in".
It depends on what you mean by mainstream. These issues as I 
cited are not not related to the language itself per se. Its 
related to the ecosystem.

And its mislead to make it seem like there's some "elite" group 
of coders here who are absolutely comfortable with the current 
state of affairs. Besides, you can read from all the experiences 
shared in this thread and see how many of them are not related to 
D itself being a blocker. Its the other stuff.

Do we know how many people use D or are interested in D? No. Do 
we know the "self-selected group" of people or the sort of 
interest in D? No. Do we know what people are using D for in 
their companies? I'm not sure we do.

Very little survey is done on some of these things. Its again 
misleading to think comments here is a true representation of D 
users. Many people I've unexpectedly met online almost never post 
anything here.

And since no~ one really knows where the D money goes and where 
help is much needed (as such information is not available for 
community members to know), I'll say there not much~ financial 
investment into D tools. To expect that someone will do this for 
free is almost not going to happen. Again we've seen that anytime 
the D Foundation pays someone (through funds, campaign, etc), job 
gets done.

If there was an "elite" group of hard-core programmers who don't 
care about tools, Visual Studio wouldn't exist in the first place.

I'm not saying we are Microsoft, I'm saying we should NOT beat 
down concerns and issues expressed in relations to the tools we 
have or don't have...yet.

I'm personally very glad we have people here who go as far (some 
each and every days for yrs) to invest heavily in D tools out of 
their free time. But that alone is not enough for a small 
community like ours. Again the community could be bigger.

And about community, it not just about popularity at all. Its 
more about having many hands on deck, people with diverse skills 
and experience to contribute to both the core language, tools, 
resources, finance and the like.