On Monday, 27 July 2015 at 22:47:05 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
On Monday, 27 July 2015 at 21:54:23 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Monday, 27 July 2015 at 20:49:54 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
I'll do my best to limit my participation in emotional
debates, and suggest other D luminaries to do the same.
LOL. That's why I was originally planning to not say anything
in this thread...
- Jonathan M Davis
Your comments were very clear and much appreciated, but I see
the point.
Well, I ended up commenting, because there were some very import
points relevant to what we do with D that needed clarifying. What
I wanted to avoid (and mostly did) was arguing over Rust vs D.
For instance, I'd hate to lose the ternary operator in favor of
the expression if-else blocks that were being suggested, but
there's no point in arguing over it, because we're not going to
lose the the ternary operator, and we're not going to make it so
that if-else blocks can be used as expressions. Arguing about it
at this point just creates contention. And it's far too easy to
come at that sort of discussion from an emotional point of view
that D is better because I really like it and am invested in it,
and what's being suggested is alien to me or doesn't fit with my
aesthetics or whatever. Sometimes what another language has _is_
better, but often, it's a trade-off or even completely
subjective, and regardless, it generally isn't going to have any
effect on D at this point. Rather, it's just going to make
emotions flare. So, at this point, I'd prefer to generally avoid
discussions of D vs any other language. I got into a really nasty
argument about ranges vs iterators the other day on reddit, and I
just don't want to be doing that sort of thing anymore.
However, what we _do_ stand to learn from is what's work welling
for other languages (like Rust) in terms of process and the
things that they do that don't necessarily have to do with the
language itself which help them succeed, particularly, since even
though we're generally pretty strong on the language front (not
perfect, but we definitely have a very strong offering), we tend
to have problems with marketing, getting folks to contribute,
getting those contributions merged in in a timely manner, getting
releases out, etc. We've definitely improved on that front, but
it's probably our weakest point, whereas the language itself is
pretty fantastic.
But I would like to avoid arguments over which language is better
or which feature in which language is better or anything like
that, particularly since we're unlikely to add anything to D at
this point because of such discussions. Rather, we need to finish
what we have and make it solid.
- Jonathan M Davis