Having "blessed" 3rd party libraries may make D more popular and stable for building real software.

[Dejan Lekic]

On Wednesday, 2 July 2025 at 18:05:46 UTC, WraithGlade wrote:
> On Wednesday, 2 July 2025 at 09:13:40 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote:
>> @WraithGlade
>>
>> "blessing" will not help it. - Quality will. If package is of 
>> good quality - it will automatically become "blessed".
>
> The meaning of "blessing" a library in this context is 
> literally *making an official and regular effort to improve the 
> quality of important libraries and make them more seamless and 
> usable for real software, i.e. to increase the quality in all 
> the senses that library quality matters to users*. Thus, 
> translating your statement back into the actual meaning of the 
> word "blessed" in the context of this thread results in the 
> following real meaning:
>
>> [Making an official commitment to strongly improving the 
>> quality of the most important libraries] will not help [those 
>> libraries]. - Quality will. If [a] package is of good quality 
>> - it will automatically become [subject to an official 
>> commitment by the language development team to ensure the 
>> library(s) continue(s) to be of high quality].
>
> Do you see how this is actually just a nonsensical tautology 
> that results in a blatant self-contradiction?
>
> Frankly, this seems like exactly the kind of out-of-touch 
> circular rhetoric that has historically plagued these forums 
> and some parts of the D community (based on looking at prior 
> threads here and people's commentary in communities outside of 
> D) and seems likely to create the kind of muddled atmosphere 
> that prevents constructive change from happening.
>
> I have noticed this unpleasant pattern before on programming 
> communities though, always with very harmful effects: confusing 
> the emotion of certainty with actual logical certainty born 
> from genuine logical reasoning.
>
> Many programmers become so used to thinking of themselves as 
> being right because they know more than average non-programmers 
> and so adopt the posture of being in the right by default, but 
> context is everything and in reality nobody ever has an a 
> priori "rightness" that can ever be used as a real substitute 
> for genuinely thinking about a different idea when one 
> encounters such an idea.
>
> Dejan Lekic's comment seems like a microcosm of why so many 
> people have become frustrated with D and have simply given up 
> on it since this kind of duplicitous rhetoric seems pervasive 
> and not amenable to change given that years of such attempts 
> have apparently failed. I previously just assumed that was 
> because of programmers being our usual salty and opinionated 
> selves, but the new evidence I've seen today suggests those 
> criticisms hold water. Why else would the contributions have 
> decayed so rapidly to almost nothing compared to much greater 
> prior rates even just a few years ago?

Yes, I fully accept the criticism. - I deserve it.
You and I have different understanding of what you referred to as 
"blessed". Now after re-reading everything, both the original 
post, and your reply to what I wrote I think I do have a better 
understanding of what you tried to say. Here is one of the 
critical parts of your essay:

> Having one or more officially backed ("blessed" or "vendor") 
> libraries helps ensure that a programming language remains 
> usable for real software more consistently and decreases the 
> chances people will be deterred due to having difficulty 
> getting the basics working.

So, correct me if I am wrong, by "blessed" here you mean 
"officially backed", right? And later you explained that having 
an officially backed projects will improve their quality. It 
makes sense - if there people committed to improve something 
their effort will probably succeed.

"officially backed" implies some sort of commitment. From whom? 
Core D developers? Some members of the D community? The only 
people I can think of who can make something D related "official" 
are members of the core D team, and I fear they do not have 
resources to do this. Some of them are probably reading this and 
will correct me if I am wrong.