On Monday, 29 December 2014 at 15:18:57 UTC, Gary Willoughby
wrote:
This is probably the most disgusting, selfish and deluded posts
i've read on this entire newsgroup.
If D is supposed to supplant C/C++, then the needs of those
users *must* be met, especially without deriding those very
users. Just because you work on the D ecosystem does not give
you 'carte blanche' to tell a user to stop making enquiries
into features that are promised by D.
The user is the entire goal of D! Forgetting this relegates D
to obscurity and makes you look like an ass.
No, not really. Open source is about people working to fulfill
their own personal goals and not minding to share resulting
code if it doesn't mean much added effort. Only few care about
things like long-term success and only tiny minority will be
interested in working on ecosystem they don't use.
With that paragraph, you've just dumped on Walter, Andrei's and
all other open source contributor's efforts for the past n
years!
I strongly disagree. Dicebot's post is completely true,
describing exactly how open source projects actually work,
instead of some idealized notion of "Open source it and they will
come!" I think some people have unrealistic expectations of open
source after the success of past large projects like the linux
kernel, gcc, clang, Qt, etc., all of which had heavy commercial
support from IBM, Red Hat, Apple, Trolltech/Nokia and so on. D
has not reached that stage of commercial support yet, so the
expectation that good Windows tooling and support will just
magically appear is unrealistic, particularly for free.
You are right that the user's needs will ultimately have to be
met for D to ever take off to the next level, but I don't recall
anyone ever "promising" a good Windows debugging experience, docs
that you can learn the language from, or widespread Windows
support for D libraries. D is a community project: Manu can note
those deficiencies, but as Dicebot said, unless someone wants to
work on them or like-minded users pay for someone to do it, the
community will generally not just do what he wants.
Saying that Dicebot's valid point, that everybody has different
goals from open source and most only care about their narrow use
case, is dumping on Walter and Andrei's efforts is going off the
deep end a bit. I'm sure they are very aware of this reality,
and are thankful for the few steady contributors they have.
