We are forking D

[Walter Bright]

On 1/9/2024 9:42 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>  From a technical
> standpoint, D has no parallels that I know of -- it comes very close to
> my ideal of what a programming language should be.  But the way it's
> managed leaves a lot to be desired.  It would be a pity for this
> beautiful language to languish when under a different style of
> management it could be flourishing and taking over the world.


Thank you for the kind compliments about D. Perhaps one reason it is such a nice 
language is because I say "no" to most enhancements? D would have version 
algebra and macros if it was a committee. Some features are great ideas, until 
you've used them for 10 years, and come to the realization that they aren't so 
good of an idea.

Aesthetic appeal is a big deal. D has got to look good on the screen, because 
after all, we spend most "programming" time just staring at the code. I remember 
once attending a C++ conference where the presenter had slides of his innovative 
ideas, and I had the thought that there was no way to format that or rewrite it 
so it looked good. I've had that experience many times with C++.

For example, one of the Tango features I rejected was creating a clone of C++'s 
iostreams. I knew by then that iostreams was a great idea, but it just looked 
awful on the screen (and had some other fundamental problems). The modern 
consensus is that iostreams was a misuse of operator overloading.

D also restricts operator overloading to discourage using it as a DSL (though 
Tango still managed to use it for I/O).

I could go on with that, but that's enough for the moment.

The end goal for me with D is that it will no longer need me.

As for Phobos, I am not involved with it directly. There has been a sequence of 
people in charge of it, but that hasn't worked out too well. But there is a core 
team of 35 people (though some are inactive) that controls what goes into it:

https://github.com/orgs/dlang/teams/team-phobos

They have the authority to decide what goes in Phobos or not. I'm open to 
nominations to that team.

Anybody can bring attention on the n.g. to any PR that is being overlooked.