On Thursday, 6 September 2018 at 14:42:14 UTC, Chris wrote:
On Thursday, 6 September 2018 at 14:30:38 UTC, Guillaume Piolat
wrote:
On Thursday, 6 September 2018 at 13:30:11 UTC, Chris wrote:
And autodecode is a good example of experts getting it wrong,
because, you know, you cannot be an expert in all fields. I
think the problem was that it was discovered too late.
There are very valid reasons not to talk about auto-decoding
again:
- it's too late to remove because breakage
- attempts at removing it were _already_ tried
- it has been debated to DEATH
- there is an easy work-around
So any discussion _now_ would have the very same structure of
the discussion _then_, and would lead to the exact same
result. It's quite tragic. And I urge the real D supporters to
let such conversation die (topics debated to death) as soon as
they appear.
The real supporters? So it's a religion? For me it's about
technology and finding a good tool for a job.
Religions have believers but not supporters - in fact saying you
are a supporter says you are not a member of that faith or
community. I support the Catholic Church's efforts to relieve
poverty in XYZ country - you're not a core part of that effort
directly.
Social institutions need support to develop - language is a very
old human institution, and programming languages have more
similarity with natural languages alongst certain dimensions (I'm
aware that NLP is your field) than some recognise.
So, why shouldn't a language have supporters? I give some money
to the D Foundation - this is called providing support. Does
that make me a zealot, or someone who confuses a computer
programming language with a religion? I don't think so. I give
money to the Foundation because it's a win-win. It makes me
happy to support the development of things that are beautiful and
it's commercially a no-brainer because of the incidental benefits
it brings. Probably I would do so without those benefits, but on
the other hand the best choices in life often end up solving
problems you weren't even planning on solving and maybe didn't
know you had.
Does that make me a monomaniac who thinks D should be used
everywhere, and only D - the one true language? I don't think
so. I confess to being excited by the possibility of writing web
applications in D, but that has much more to do with Javascript
and the ecosystem than it does D. And on the other hand - even
though I have supported the development of a Jupyter kernel for D
(something that conceivably could make Julia less necessary) -
I'm planning on doing more with Julia, because it's a better
solution for some of our commercial problems than anything else I
could find, including D. Does using Julia mean we will write
less D? No - being able to do more work productively means
writing more code, probably including more D, Python and C#.
I suggest the problem is in fact the entitlement of people who
expect others to give them things for free without recognising
that some appreciation would be in order, and that if one can
helping in whatever way is possible is probably the right thing
to do even if it's in a small way in the beginning. This is of
course a well-known challenge of open-source projects in general,
but it's my belief it's a fleeting period already passing for D.
You know sometimes it's clear from the way someone argues that it
isn't about what they say. If the things they claim were
problems were in fact anti-problems (merits) they would make
different arguments but with the same emotional tone.
It's odd - if something isn't useful for me then either I just
move on and find something that is, or I try to directly act
myself or organise others to improve it so it is useful. I don't
stand there grumbling at the toolmakers whilst taking no positive
action to make that change happen.
