On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 08:59:28 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
It won't happen until the leads of the project COMMIT to a
MEASURABLE goal and a major effort is made to meet that goal.
That means putting other goals aside until that measurable goal
has been met.
I'm sorry, but I think you are misinterpreting how the community
works. Don't get me wrong, I've only be here for 2 years and I'm
not a guru of social interactions, but to me it's clear that the
D "project" is a bit different from your usual "leaders decide,
everyone else follows".
The "heads" (read Andrei and Walter) surely have some "powers".
Perhaps they have abused those in the past (introducing features
without general consensus), they might be able to impose a veto
on a feature, but they won't prevent you from contributing, if
that contribution is approved by the rest of the user base.
Yeah, but that games company needs to commit to taking a lead
role so that the goal post and vision changes in that direction.
"Leading role" is rather generic in this kind of organization. A
"leader" is more or less someone that you listen to, someone you
trust because you think what they are asking and proposing
rational stuff. Personally, as an example, I listen to Manu and I
listen to Daniel Murphy, because they appear to have a nice
project that can give some great visibility to D.
There is a problem: most of the times the user of a tool has no
time to work on the tool itself. What should Manu do other than
going to Dconf, presenting their hard work, and convincing his
coworkers?
The "project leaders" have really limited resources. Stating a
vision for the D as a language is useless if you don't have the
resources to achieve it. Sure, if you have your voice heard (like
Andrei) it's easier to convince other people to share your
vision, but this doesn't mean you can force people on working on
something extremely specific. This nets to having zero
"traditional" leader power.
What could be done is doing a massive crowdfunding campaign, get
a few full-time hired developers, and change that.
The leads believe in meritocracy, that means the project will
flail around in any direction that is fun. That means there are
no rails. There is no reason to pull or push a train that is
not on rails. To get D to be a true better C++ you need a
concerted effort.
No, first of all you need the same amount of economic backing.
The one backing the project will shape it the most. True
democracy is pure utopia. People have different interests and
different ideas, which are often conflicting. In the end it's all
about resources.
