We are forking D

[Abdulhaq]

On Tuesday, 9 January 2024 at 15:01:28 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>

Great comment.

I love Andrei but yes that Good Work vs Great Work thing was 
meant to be motivational BS but was actually just plain BS.

Andrei also teased the community with leadership-backed evolution 
of Phobos, but then he failed to show up.

A few birds-eye view observations of my own:

* D is Walter's baby and his life work. As other people come and 
go, as they are wont do with any project such as D, he knows he 
will be left holding the baby and maintaining it. That is why he 
will not accept PRs unless they appeal to his taste and he is 
confident they are a net positive and don't complicate the whole 
thing too much. I fully expect Adam to start behaving like this 
BTW, for the same reasons.

At some point in the history of D it was realised there needed to 
be a way to make the evolution of D more democratic. This is when 
DIPs were introduced. However, Walter's reluctance to accept DIPs 
made them an infamous time sink and often a dead end.In my view 
this is not unreasonable but it's certainly annoying for would-be 
contributors.

* Languages such as D need a BDFL who spends more time managing 
and orchestrating developments than cutting their own code. 
However, if often doesn't work out like that. Walter becomes a 
bottleneck and until he steps back from CTO, he will remain so.

* In the python world, the standard library is considered to be 
the place where libraries go to die, because the API becomes 
frozen. I agree with that take, and would concentrate on having a 
good packaging system where it's easy find the popular and well 
maintained libraries for given tasks e.g. XML, json, database 
clients etc. Forget about fighting to get stuff into Phobos, it's 
too hard and a fool's errand.