We are forking D

[Lance Bachmeier]

On Sunday, 7 January 2024 at 11:54:16 UTC, bomat wrote:
> On Thursday, 4 January 2024 at 03:12:48 UTC, Don Allen wrote:
>> I view this development positively. The constant strife I've 
>> observed as a latecomer to D, but as someone who has done and 
>> managed software development for a very long time, was clearly 
>> not healthy or accomplishing anything other than wasting 
>> peoples' energy, because it wasn't converging. This divorce 
>> will hopefully allow the disagreements to be resolved on 
>> technical merits.
>
> Also being a newcomer to the language, I quite agree. While 
> it's sad to see a split in a language that is already niche as 
> it is, I try to see the positive sides (as Abdulhaq wrote, 
> forking is better than quitting), and I hope that everyone can 
> gain new insights by having a direct comparison between 
> different approaches.

I'd much rather Adam put his time into a fork, rather than the 
more common approach where he'd post here under various names, 
make ridiculous claims, and vandalize the discussions. If you're 
new, you may not have seen the many posts from someone that 
doesn't like private at the module level.

Whether there are useful insights from this or any other fork 
will depend on what they do with it. If there's too much 
incompatibility of code, due to breaking changes, it won't have 
much effect. There's already Nim, Rust, Go, Zig, etc., to compare 
with and the forks will in each case be just another language.

>> That D hasn't taken over the world is beside the point; good 
>> things aren't always popular, e.g., Scheme, and sometimes bad 
>> things are very popular, e.g., Windows, JavaScript, C/C++.
>
> Now this is the point where I have to totally disagree with 
> you. It doesn't suffice for a system to be well designed and 
> great to use "in theory", there must also be tooling, 
> documentation, thousands if not millions of samples, and an 
> active community.

Not really. Those things come after the userbase gets large. I 
was using Python in the 1990s and I can assure you that the 
growth did not come because of good tooling, documentation, or 
code samples. Similarly, I was using R when you used Emacs or a 
plain text editor, the documentation was similar to Linux man 
pages, and you asked questions on a mailing list with Brian 
Ripley. Only after it took off did they build RStudio. What both 
languages had was a small, dedicated group of users that were 
willing and able to build useful things with the language.