On Thursday, 23 August 2018 at 03:50:44 UTC, Shachar Shemesh
wrote:
No, no and no.
I was holding out on replying to this thread to see how the
community would react. The vibe I'm getting, however, is that
the people who are seeing D's problems have given up on
affecting change.
It is no secret that when I joined Weka, I was a sole D
detractor among a company quite enamored with the language. I
used to have quite heated water cooler debates about that point
of view.
Every single one of the people rushing to defend D at the time
has since come around. There is still some debate on whether,
points vs. counter points, choosing D was a good idea, but the
overwhelming consensus inside Weka today is that D has *fatal*
flaws and no path to fixing them.
A list, please? Now that I actually have time to fix things, I
intend to do so.
And by "fatal", I mean literally flaws that are likely to
literally kill the language.
And the thing that brought them around is not my power of
persuasion. The thing that brought them around was spending a
couple of years working with the language on an every-day basis.
And you will notice this in the way Weka employees talk on this
forum: except me, they all disappeared. You used to see Idan,
Tomer and Eyal post here. Where are they?
This forum is hostile to criticism, and generally tries to keep
everyone using D the same way. If you're cutting edge D, the
forum is almost no help at all. Consensus among former posters
here is that it is generally a waste of time, so almost
everyone left, and those who didn't, stopped posting.
And it's not just Weka. I've had a chance to talk in private to
some other developers. Quite a lot have serious, fundamental
issues with the language. You will notice none of them speaks
up on this thread.
They don't see the point.
That reminds me, what happened to our conversation with Ali
Çehreli about splitting general into Technical and less
technical? Not to imply that the problems listed are purely
technical. There is a distinct lack of well documented direction
beyond incremental improvements.
No technical project is born great. If you want a technical
project to be great, the people working on it have to focus on
its *flaws*. The D's community just doesn't do that.
To sum it up: fatal flaws + no path to fixing + no push from
the community = inevitable eventual death.
With great regrets,
Shachar
Indeed. It is time to push, then.
Nic
