On Tuesday, 4 September 2018 at 01:36:53 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 18:26:57 UTC, Chris wrote:
I think this sort of misunderstanding is the source of a lot
of friction on this forum. Some users think (or in my case:
thought) that D will be a sound and stable language one day, a
language they can use for loads of stuff, while the leadership
prefers to keep it at a stage where they can test ideas to see
what works and what doesn't, wait let me rephrase this, where
the user can test other people's ideas with every new release.
First of all, thanks a lot for your answer. I appreciate it. I
have to know where I'm standing in order to be able to plan
ahead. I don't think this is unreasonable.
D is not a petri dish for testing ideas. It's not an
experiment. It's a serious language. Walter, Andrei, and
everyone involved in maintaining and developing it want to see
it succeed. They aren't just treading water, wasting everyone's
time. And I know you keep hearing this, but I'll say it anyway:
most of the development is based on volunteer work, and trying
to get volunteers to do anything they don't want to do is like
asking them to voluntarily have their teeth pulled when they
don't need to.
I have no doubt at all that Walter, Andrei et al are a 100%
serious about D, as in "a professional tool" and I do not
question their expertise and experience. However, for a bit more
than a year I've been under the impression that scarce resources
are spent on features and details that are not critical to
production when you use D, while more basic things that are
sometimes not related to D as such are put on the long finger.
Walter has said that people come to him and ask what they
should work on. He provides them with a list of priority tasks.
Then they go off and work on something else. That's the nature
of unsponsored open-source development and has been the biggest
challenge for D for years.
I can imagine that. This is why volunteers are not the way to go
when it comes to core development and the ecosystem. This is why
foundations with a lot of funding and IT companies spend a lot of
resources on these two aspects.
I have high hopes that some of this can be turned around by
raising more money and I have long-term plans to try and
facilitate that over the coming months. With more money, we can
get people to work on targeted tasks even when they have no
vested interest in it. We can pull in full-time coders, maybe
get someone to oversee PR reviews so they don't stay open so
long, fund development of broader ecosystem projects.
There isn't anyone involved in the core D development who isn't
aware of the broader issues in the community or the ecosystem,
and they are working to bring improvements. I have been around
this community since 2003. From my perspective, it has been one
continuous march of progress. Sometimes slow, sometimes fast,
but always moving, always getting better. And right now there
are more people involved than ever in moving it forward.
Unfortunately, there are also more demands on more fronts than
ever. There are longtime users who become increasingly
frustrated when the issues that matter to them still aren't
resolved, newcomers who have no context of all the progress
that has been made and instead hold D in comparison to Rust,
Go, and other languages that have stronger backing and more
manpower. That's perfectly legitimate.
Which is what I've been talking about in this thread. D is too
old to live with its parents :) Too many people already use it in
production or are interested in it. There are a) longtime users
who still have to put up with OSS style hacks and are growing
tired of it (after years of putting in a lot of effort). There
are b) new users who are put off by the lack of a smooth
ecosystem. And both groups are told that "that's the way we do
things around here".
And of course, low manpower and funding aren't the complete
picture. Management also play a role. Both Walter and Andrei
have freely admitted they are not managers and that they're
learning as they go. Mistakes have been made. In hindsight,
some decisions should have gone a different way. But that is
not the same as not caring, or not understanding/
Exactly. As I said in an earlier message, it's not just the money
(or the lack thereof), it's the approach. In my opinion Both
Walter and Andrei should hire a manager who is not involved in
the core development. If you're involved in the core development
you cannot be managing things at the same time and "learn as you
go along". That's a recipe for disaster. It's not a good idea to
mix management and development because they are two completely
different things, and you might end up not being good at any of
them.
A manager could lay down a practical road map based on what users
need _most_, secure funding and direct the funding towards the
most urgent issues. Everyone should do what they're good at, only
in this way you can get optimal results.
So please, don't attribute any disingenuous motives to any of
the core team members. They all want D to succeed. Identifying
core problems and discussing ways to solve them is a more
productive way to spend our bandwidth.
Never would I attribute "disingenuous motives" to the members of
the core team. But sometimes perceptions are different and one
might not see the wood for trees so it's good to get input from
the outside now and again. The reason I got a bit sarcastic or
polemical at times is that I didn't get a real answer (until
now), especially at a moment when I'm reassessing my programming
options for the future. And I don't seem to be the only one
either who asks himself "to D or not to D?". Other (new)
languages now have many features that made me pick up D in the
first place, and they offer a smoother and more comprehensive
experience on top of that. I don't think this should be taken
lightly by the core team / D Foundation. Don't forget, for
various reasons developers are keen on testing new stuff at the
moment.
I only posted here to raise awareness of the issues, I could have
just left silently as many others have. And yes, I have better
things to do than to be on this forum, like testing my future
optionst.
