On Tuesday, 11 April 2017 at 19:18:32 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 10:24:01AM -0700, Walter Bright via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
On 4/11/2017 2:18 AM, qznc wrote:
> It usually comes down to charismatic and visionary leaders.
> Walter and Andrei are good with that, otherwise D would have
> faltered long ago.
For a socially inept nerd such as myself, with all the
charisma of a lamppost, I think D has done very well.
You underestimate yourself. While you're no charismatic hero by
any stretch of imagination, you do carry quite some weight in
what you say simply by your history of achievements, as well as
your technical expertise and wealth of experience in
computer-related issues. It's no surprise that in this crowd
full of like-minded nerds who respect technical expertise,
you're doing none too badly. It might be a completely
different story if you were in a more "typical" social setting,
though. :-P
I was going to say something similar. I have seen responses in
reddit/HN threads where devs were in awe that Walter Bright
responded to them. In the tech community, which has _completely_
different ideas of what constitutes charisma and vision, Walter
and Andrei, with his distinguished history and very entertaining
talks, are pretty much the definition. That is not the issue, D
has those in spades.
The issues I see are communication and delegation, both of which
probably come down to the same problem: bus factor
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor). I get the sense that
the communication problems come down to reading and responding to
a ton of threads, in addition to organizing DConf and doing a
bunch of other D scut work, so that you don't have time to fully
context switch for each discussion.
Taking a page from Linus, another charismatic visionary (remember
we're talking charisma _within tech_ here) who heads the most
successful open source project of them all, is probably in order
here: choose people to delegate specific roles to and get that
stuff off your plate.
Andrei has talked about doing this before, and roles like release
manager, now manned by Martin Nowak, and DIP manager, Mike
Parker, have been spun off. I'm guessing Sociomantic has picked
up a lot of the DConf management. But I figure there's more to
be done.
I suggest that Walter and Andrei get together and figure out what
else they _shouldn't_ be doing and spin those out as specific
roles, advertising that they want someone to fill them. Think of
it like putting up a job ad: you must figure out what work needs
to be done, specify detailed job roles to do it, then advertise
the openings.
I've seen vague calls for help so far, but not anything specific
like this. You may not get anyone to fill these new volunteer
roles, but you're more likely to get someone than with the
current approach.
Of course, I could be wrong and you've already delegated
everything that you want, but I get the sense that isn't so. As
D scales, getting this delegation right is going to be critical.
On Tuesday, 11 April 2017 at 17:28:51 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 4/11/2017 4:57 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
On 2017-04-11 00:07, Walter Bright wrote:
There are many. A random sampling:
Jacob Carlborg - Objective C support
Actually, this one wasn't my idea originally. It was Michel
Fortin that started
this work and did most of it. I just did the necessary work to
get it merged
(the initial version).
I.e. you self-selected and emerged as the champion of it, and
got it done. You're exactly what I'm talking about.
It's not really about ideas, it's about getting **** done, and
the people in the D community that get **** done are inevitably
the people who decide what gets done.
Something could be the bestest idea evar, but without a
champion it is going nowhere.
While this is undoubtedly how open source usually works, I'm not
sure it's exactly right for D. For example, there was the
checkedint PR that was submitted to Phobos and then rejected by
Andrei, only for him to write and merge his own. You could argue
that the author of the original checkedint got 5#!* done, at
least in terms of putting up an implementation, but that wasn't
enough. Not saying it was a waste, as it's still up on dub, for
anyone who prefers it to use.
Your original description of getting things done is mostly
correct, just didn't like you saying it's not "about ideas,"
because it very clearly is that too. No doubt you're right that
the "bestest idea" won't matter if it's not championed by someone
who will build it, but let's not diminish ideas.
