On Saturday, 18 August 2018 at 22:20:57 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 8/18/2018 9:59 AM, Jonathan Marler wrote:
In your mind, what defines the D language's level of success?
It no longer needs me or Andrei.
Yes, I think this state would be a good indicator of success.
This requires attracting developers with strong technical ability
and good leadership to manage it. I think requires cultivating a
community that rewards good work and encourages contribution.
When I was heavily contributing, it was because of people like
Seb and Mike who would review pull requests and tried to keep the
flow of work moving. But many time it was quashed by other
developers and eventually it didn't make sense for me to
contribute anymore when dozens of hours of good work can't get
through. If this doesn't change, D won't be able to keep good
developers.
I posed this question to Andrei because I really want to know the
answer. The success of a language can mean very different things
to each person. The most important aspect of D for me is its
continuing progress towards stability/robustness. Though I would
say that the language could be considered the best in the world
with its balance of safety, performance and practicality, it is
very far from perfect. In my mind, D becomes more successful as
the language itself becomes better. And if D doesn't continue to
improve, it will be supplanted by new languages that continue to
be created at an astounding rate.
Others may consider D's popularity to be the most important
indicator of D's success. I think everyone would agree this is
important, however, I would much rather use a good language on my
own then a mediocre language with everyone else.
I will also say that in order to read that article and apply it
to "D's success", you most certainly need to know exactly what
that means to identify what D's leverage points are. It was an
interesting article. Many of the concepts were familiar and it
was interesting to see them all laid out in a simple model and
prioritized. Thanks for the link Andrei.
