On Wednesday, 23 August 2017 at 23:27:22 UTC, Brad Roberts wrote:
On 8/23/2017 3:58 PM, Mark via Digitalmars-d wrote:
This kind of criticism comes up fairly often in the forums,
maybe once every few weeks. I can link to the recent threads
on the matter, but I'm sure you can make an educated guess
about the responses therein. The gist of it, in my view, is
that:
"[Making] D more approachable and attractive to people
thinking of picking up the language."
just isn't a high priority right now.
That's one way to look at it.
Another, slightly more accurate and nuanced version is that
there are many areas for improvement, and those that are doing
work to improve things are doing them in areas they believe are
important and useful for their work. That there's not more in
the area <X>, that you (and others) believe is important,
merely shows that the number that believe <X> is important
enough to work on right now is close to zero. That doesn't
mean that <X> isn't also important, just that it's not at the
top of the priority list for those getting things done.
Convince someone that <X> is higher priority than the things
they're working on then you might see some movement on those
fronts. Or convince yourself that it's important enough to
engage in yourself. This isn't really a community level issue
so much as a very personal level issue. It's not sufficient
for something to be declared a community level priority if no
one at the personal level is interested enough to contribute
their time.
That's the longer version of what I meant to say.
I don't think the concept of a community level priority has any
meaning in this context- there is no centralized decision making
mechanism in the D community. The "priority" I was referring to
in my previous post is just a simple average of the personal
priorities of language contributors.
