Re: Community Rant
On Wednesday, 23 August 2017 at 23:27:22 UTC, Brad Roberts wrote: On 8/23/2017 3:58 PM, Mark via Digitalmars-d wrote: This kind of criticism comes up fairly often in the forums, maybe once every few weeks. I can link to the recent threads on the matter, but I'm sure you can make an educated guess about the responses therein. The gist of it, in my view, is that: "[Making] D more approachable and attractive to people thinking of picking up the language." just isn't a high priority right now. That's one way to look at it. Another, slightly more accurate and nuanced version is that there are many areas for improvement, and those that are doing work to improve things are doing them in areas they believe are important and useful for their work. That there's not more in the area , that you (and others) believe is important, merely shows that the number that believe is important enough to work on right now is close to zero. That doesn't mean that isn't also important, just that it's not at the top of the priority list for those getting things done. Convince someone that is higher priority than the things they're working on then you might see some movement on those fronts. Or convince yourself that it's important enough to engage in yourself. This isn't really a community level issue so much as a very personal level issue. It's not sufficient for something to be declared a community level priority if no one at the personal level is interested enough to contribute their time. That's the longer version of what I meant to say. I don't think the concept of a community level priority has any meaning in this context- there is no centralized decision making mechanism in the D community. The "priority" I was referring to in my previous post is just a simple average of the personal priorities of language contributors.
Re: Community Rant
On Wednesday, 23 August 2017 at 18:20:19 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote: Weka uses D after their CTO Liran's evaluation of a number of programming languages. Liran explains why he chose D and why he still thinks D was the right choice in his a couple of DConf talks. I worked at Weka for a while where I met many wonderful people like Jonathan. Although they were being "forced" to use D, nobody was seriously complaining. :) Now I work with an ex-Weka employee as an ex-Weka employee myself. That other person insisted that he should use D in his piece of the product. Sanity exists... ;) It's great news that such a company with such technology is building it on top of D :) Too bad D doesn't get the free publicity from being in the "technology providers" listing :p only big sexy industry names there...
Re: Community Rant
On Wednesday, August 23, 2017 16:27:22 Brad Roberts via Digitalmars-d wrote: > On 8/23/2017 3:58 PM, Mark via Digitalmars-d wrote: > > On Tuesday, 22 August 2017 at 15:14:33 UTC, Jonathan Shamir wrote: > >> [...] > >> > >> But lets be honest. If I was just interested to learn about this > >> "modern system programming language" that is C++ done right, I would > >> dismiss D very quickly. We need to get together as a community and > >> rethink your priorities, because with problems like this we're making > >> it very hard for newcomers to trust in this very poorly adapted > >> language. > >> > >> Programming tools used by day to day programmers should be a priority. > >> Because everyone expects valgrind to work. > >> > >> [...] > > > > This kind of criticism comes up fairly often in the forums, maybe once > > every few weeks. I can link to the recent threads on the matter, but I'm > > sure you can make an educated guess about the responses therein. The > > gist of it, in my view, is that: > > > > "[Making] D more approachable and attractive to people thinking of > > picking up the language." > > > > just isn't a high priority right now. > > That's one way to look at it. > > Another, slightly more accurate and nuanced version is that there are > many areas for improvement, and those that are doing work to improve > things are doing them in areas they believe are important and useful for > their work. That there's not more in the area , that you (and > others) believe is important, merely shows that the number that believe > is important enough to work on right now is close to zero. That > doesn't mean that isn't also important, just that it's not at the > top of the priority list for those getting things done. > > Convince someone that is higher priority than the things they're > working on then you might see some movement on those fronts. Or > convince yourself that it's important enough to engage in yourself. > This isn't really a community level issue so much as a very personal > level issue. It's not sufficient for something to be declared a > community level priority if no one at the personal level is interested > enough to contribute their time. Well said. - Jonathan M Davis
Re: Community Rant
On 8/23/2017 3:58 PM, Mark via Digitalmars-d wrote: On Tuesday, 22 August 2017 at 15:14:33 UTC, Jonathan Shamir wrote: [...] But lets be honest. If I was just interested to learn about this "modern system programming language" that is C++ done right, I would dismiss D very quickly. We need to get together as a community and rethink your priorities, because with problems like this we're making it very hard for newcomers to trust in this very poorly adapted language. Programming tools used by day to day programmers should be a priority. Because everyone expects valgrind to work. [...] This kind of criticism comes up fairly often in the forums, maybe once every few weeks. I can link to the recent threads on the matter, but I'm sure you can make an educated guess about the responses therein. The gist of it, in my view, is that: "[Making] D more approachable and attractive to people thinking of picking up the language." just isn't a high priority right now. That's one way to look at it. Another, slightly more accurate and nuanced version is that there are many areas for improvement, and those that are doing work to improve things are doing them in areas they believe are important and useful for their work. That there's not more in the area , that you (and others) believe is important, merely shows that the number that believe is important enough to work on right now is close to zero. That doesn't mean that isn't also important, just that it's not at the top of the priority list for those getting things done. Convince someone that is higher priority than the things they're working on then you might see some movement on those fronts. Or convince yourself that it's important enough to engage in yourself. This isn't really a community level issue so much as a very personal level issue. It's not sufficient for something to be declared a community level priority if no one at the personal level is interested enough to contribute their time.
Re: Community Rant
On Tuesday, 22 August 2017 at 15:14:33 UTC, Jonathan Shamir wrote: [...] But lets be honest. If I was just interested to learn about this "modern system programming language" that is C++ done right, I would dismiss D very quickly. We need to get together as a community and rethink your priorities, because with problems like this we're making it very hard for newcomers to trust in this very poorly adapted language. Programming tools used by day to day programmers should be a priority. Because everyone expects valgrind to work. [...] This kind of criticism comes up fairly often in the forums, maybe once every few weeks. I can link to the recent threads on the matter, but I'm sure you can make an educated guess about the responses therein. The gist of it, in my view, is that: "[Making] D more approachable and attractive to people thinking of picking up the language." just isn't a high priority right now.
Re: Community Rant
On 08/22/2017 08:24 AM, ixid wrote: On Tuesday, 22 August 2017 at 15:14:33 UTC, Jonathan Shamir wrote: various. Out of interest did you pick up D before or after joining the start up? If before did you introduce D to them or were they already using it? Weka uses D after their CTO Liran's evaluation of a number of programming languages. Liran explains why he chose D and why he still thinks D was the right choice in his a couple of DConf talks. I worked at Weka for a while where I met many wonderful people like Jonathan. Although they were being "forced" to use D, nobody was seriously complaining. :) Now I work with an ex-Weka employee as an ex-Weka employee myself. That other person insisted that he should use D in his piece of the product. Sanity exists... ;) Ali
Re: Community Rant
But lets be honest. If I was just interested to learn about this "modern system programming language" that is C++ done right, I would dismiss D very quickly. We need to get together as a community and rethink your priorities, because with problems like this we're making it very hard for newcomers to trust in this very poorly adapted language. Programming tools used by day to day programmers should be a priority. Because everyone expects valgrind to work. The standard library should be a priority. It's far from complete (hopefully my company will contribute in this respect in the near future). The DUB package repository is horrible! More often than not, the packages are so poorly written I end up just writing my own implementation. Adding the ability to "rate" packages would go a long way in improving the situation. I understand hacking the frontend is way more interesting to most of the community. But if we don't find the time to improve on our visibility and language maturity, D will never get the attention it deserves. +1
Re: Community Rant
Am 22.08.2017 um 17:14 schrieb Jonathan Shamir: The DUB package repository is horrible! More often than not, the packages are so poorly written I end up just writing my own implementation. Adding the ability to "rate" packages would go a long way in improving the situation. We are working on this point. There will be some form of popularity and quality measures, as well as top lists to discover notable projects.
Re: Community Rant
On Tuesday, 22 August 2017 at 15:14:33 UTC, Jonathan Shamir wrote: The DUB package repository is horrible! More often than not, the packages are so poorly written I end up just writing my own implementation. Adding the ability to "rate" packages would go a long way in improving the situation. +1 There are lots of hidden gems in code.dlang.org and (maybe) some metrics to consider to measure relevance: frequency of tags/commits, number of contributors, Github stars or forks, number of dependent packages, download count per week...
Re: Community Rant
On Tuesday, August 22, 2017 15:14:33 Jonathan Shamir via Digitalmars-d wrote: > https://dlang.org/htod.html > > I click download and get an exe! > > And in the bugs section: > No linux version. > > I'll start with the productive part. If anyone can point me out > to the sources of htod I would love to compile for linux + osx. > Any task seems more attractive to me than manually converting a > 1000 line header to D. >From what I recall, it works pretty poorly anyway. As unpleasant as it may seem, the only way that I'd really consider converting a C header file would be by hand. If you want an automated solution though, dstep is probably the better way to go. http://code.dlang.org/packages/dstep I'm not sure tha anyone has touched htod in years. dstep certainly will have issues (as will any automated solution), but I believe that it's better maintained and would expect it to do a better job. > The DUB package repository is horrible! More often than not, the > packages are so poorly written I end up just writing my own > implementation. Well, that depends entirely on the individual package maintainers. At least there's actually a place to go find such projects now. It used to be that there really wasn't a good place to go find any D libraries, and there weren't very many around. So, while the situation may not be ideal and could certainly use some improvement, it has improved considerably in recent years. > Adding the ability to "rate" packages would go a > long way in improving the situation. It's been brought up before, and I expect that it will happen at some point. But it's the kind of thing that not many folks want to work on, so it's likely to suffer. It's probably the sort of thing where it would make sense for the dlang foundation to pay someone to do that now that they're able to do that at least occassionally. Someone would probably still have to show interest in doing the work though. > I understand hacking the frontend is way more interesting to most > of the community. But if we don't find the time to improve on our > visibility and language maturity, D will never get the attention > it deserves. Honestly, I think that the library gets more attention than the compiler. But in general, what gets done is what the person doing the work wants done regardless of whether that's the best thing to be doing for the community as a whole, and that's often how it goes with open source projects. Certainly, if you're looking for large additions to the standard library, that requires quite a big commitment in terms of time and effort to get it through the Phobos review process, and it seems that most folks these days simply don't want to do that. They'd rather just put their code up on code.dlang.org. A lot of small stuff does get done to Phobos all the time though. And if you compare what D's standard library has to what C++'s standard library has, D really doesn't look that bad. It has a lot of stuff that C++ doesn't. But there are some areas that C++ does better that we need to improve upon (e.g. containers - though supposedly Andrei and/or is supervising one of his students on them; they'd made some progress that they talked about at the last dconf, but whatever they're up to hasn't matured enough to make it into Phobos yet). If you're looking to have the amount of stuff that a language like Java or C# has in their standard libraries though, I think that you're forever going to be disappointed. There simply isn't enough manpower for that to happen, and it would likely require folks being paid fulltime to work on a lot of it, and that certainly isn't happening. Almost all of what gets done for the compiler and standard libraries is what folks are doing in their free time. - Jonathan M Davis
Re: Community Rant
On Tuesday, 22 August 2017 at 15:48:17 UTC, Kagamin wrote: Other possibilities can be dstep or cpp2d from visuald project. Though don't know if the latter can work on linux. So I guess someone should pick one and put it on the site. And make sure the source code is available. Having a link to a broken unusable utility on the main language website looks bad, to say the least.
Re: Community Rant
Other possibilities can be dstep or cpp2d from visuald project. Though don't know if the latter can work on linux.
Re: Community Rant
On Tuesday, 22 August 2017 at 15:24:54 UTC, ixid wrote: On Tuesday, 22 August 2017 at 15:14:33 UTC, Jonathan Shamir wrote: various. Out of interest did you pick up D before or after joining the start up? If before did you introduce D to them or were they already using it? I work at weka.io. I learned D at weka, same as most of our workers (including the founders that looked for a powerful system programming language).
Re: Community Rant
On Tuesday, 22 August 2017 at 15:14:33 UTC, Jonathan Shamir wrote: various. Out of interest did you pick up D before or after joining the start up? If before did you introduce D to them or were they already using it?
