On Tuesday, 4 September 2018 at 13:34:03 UTC,
TheSixMillionDollarMan wrote:
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:
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/
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.
I think D's 'core' problem, is that it's trying to compete
with, what are now, widely used, powerful, and well supported
languages, with sophisticate ecosystems in place already.
C/C++/Java/C# .. just for beginners.
Then it's also trying to compete with startup languages (Go,
Rust ....) - and some of those languages have billion dollar
organisations behind them, not to mention the talent levels of
their *many* designers and contributors.
C++ is much more than just a langauge. It's an established,
international treaty on what the language must be.
Java is backed by Oracle (one the of the largest organisations
in the world).
Go is backed by Google...Rust by Mozilla...(both billion dollar
global companies).
So one has to wonder, what would motivate a person (or an
organisation) to focus their attention on D.
That is not a statement about the quality of D. It's a
statement about the competitive nature of programming languages.
If you've ever read 'No Contest - the case against competition'
by Alfie Kohn, then you'd know (or at least you might agree
with that statement) that competition is not an inevitable
part of human nature. "It warps recreation by turning the
playing into a battlefield."
I wonder has already happened to D.
D should, perhaps, focus on being a place for recreation, where
one can focus on technical excellence, instead of trying to
compete in the battlefield.
I just do not see, how D can even defeat its' major competitors.
Instead D could be a place where those competitors come to look
for great ideas (which, as I understand it, does occur ..
ranges for example).
In any case, you have to work out what it is, that is going to
motivate people to focus their attention on D.
You seem to be saying that, raising money so you can pay
people, is enough.
But I wonder about that.
That's a good question, let me see if I can answer it.
Do you know what the first search engine for the web was and when
it was created? It wasn't Yahoo, google, or Bing:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine#History
The first search engines were created in 1993, google came along
in 1998 after at least two dozen others in that list, and didn't
make a profit till 2001. Some of those early competitors were
giant "billion dollar global companies," yet it's google that
dominates the web search engine market today.
Why is that? Well, for one, resources don't matter for software
on the internet as much as ideas. It's not that resources don't
matter, but that they take a back seat to your fundamental design
and the ideas behind it.
And coming up with that design and ideas takes time, the
"developmental stage" that Laeeth refers to above. In that
incubation stage, you're better off _not_ having a bunch of
normal users who want a highly polished product, just a bunch of
early adopters who can give you good feedback and are okay with
rough edges. For D, that means all the advanced features don't
fully play together well yet, and there are various bugs here and
there. To use it, you have to be okay with that.
Now, it's a fair question to ask when D will leave that
developmental stage and get more resources towards that polish,
as Chris asks, and I'm not saying I know the answers to those
questions. And let me be clear: as long as you don't push the
envelope with mixing those advanced D features and are okay
working around some bugs here and there, you're probably good now.
But simply asserting that others are rushing full-speed ahead
with more resources and therefore they will win completely
misunderstands how the game has changed online. Resources do
matter, but they're not the dominant factor like they used to be
for armies or manufacturing. Ideas are now the dominant factor,
and D has plenty of those. ;)
