On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
> I have been using D since around 2012 or 2013, instantly fell in love, use to post on the forms a lot under the name Tofu Ninja. I was convinced D was the future but since then I have become disheartened. The biggest thing that makes me feel like this is that in the 7 years I have been using D I literally have never met another programmer IRL who has even heard of it.

I'm fortunate to know about 10 other D programmers (or people that had to work with D) personally. I don't think anyone didn't like the language.



> I feel like D has failed.

I think D provides lasting value very easily and you can tell this by the increased support in https://dlang.org/orgs-using-d.html (Mercedes benz coming lastly, and sponsoring DConf).

It has the right attributes to create added value.


> I duno... what do yall think? Is D going to somehow explode in popularity in 5-10 years?

Not so soon because the picture is darkened by increasingly nihilistic language that removes time-proven approaches like good syntax, OOP and exceptions... See the history of scorbut to know how availability of multiple solutions can obscure the picture for a long time.

D is typically the product that doesn't succeed in internet forums, but is popular in the trenches.

There really are two classes of products, "good-for-status" products you can talk about when describing your taste, and "good-at-home" products you can actually use intimately. D is "good at home".

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 14:24:05 UTC, Chris wrote:
>
> Mind you, the first thing a lot of people ask is "Can I use it on mobile and is it painless to do so?". This is the reality of things. Kotlin devs realized that. Language adoption is not _only_ about language features, it's about usefulness too. This is why they simplified Scala.

I don't think the language features that have been worked on lately are because mobile/JS/ect would be considered less important. Quite the contrary for many of them, I give you examples:

-The idea behind -dip1008 is to eliminate reliance of the garbage collector when doing exception handling. If it, or something similar, will be succesful, that means you can use exceptions on precise real-time enviroments, that can't afford the GC. And you can do that without doing any special memory handling. For me, that's exactly what counts towards portability and usefulness on different platforms.

-Sebastiaan Koppe's excellent spasm library, that allows D code on browsers, uses stdx.allocator (essentially the same as std.experimental.allocator of Phobos, I'm not sure if they have ANY difference). Currently stdx.allocator won't "just work" in no-runtime enviroment, you need to do some hacks. But the point is, that work done on Phobos allocator module, that hasn't been around for long, is exactly what makes it easier to port D outside desktop enviroments.

-BetterC. I don't think I need to explain this one.

-Interfacing to C++ and Objective C. No need to maintain a separate C interface that always breaks when porting.

On 12.04.19 16:44, Chris wrote:
> As you mentioned (high) expectations

In the real world, things cannot always be totally ordered.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 14:34:10 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 11:52:18 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> (e.g. ARM)
>
> There's https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases/download/v1.15.0/ldc2-1.15.0-linux-aarch64.tar.xz

Great stuff, seriously. But painless?

D could come very close to this too:

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/native-overview.html

But imagine one day you have a great infrastructure and you can compile to Android and iOS with a switch -android / -ios etc. Then the D Foundation announces new features that will break old code or "Phobos is in maintenance mode now, we are working on Phobos2", ah and did I mention autodecode? Who wants to risk it? You know, people have to make a living, it's not just a game of features.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 13:43:46 UTC, Chris wrote:
> 1. criticism is considered weird / unreasonable (blasphemous?), sure we all know that Earth is a disc

That said, I don't know a community that does it better. Any examples?

> 2. topics are not addressed and the answers are often evasive and / or of a general philosophical or anecdotal nature

Shit is got done by libraries, dub should be enough for you? That's how all big languages do it: nuget, npm, maven, uh... C just uses tarballs, okay, but it's an exception and people complain about it way more than you.

> 3. I've said it before: personal mistakes, wrong design decisions, are socialized and the whole community is "guilty" and has to "learn". I have a different take on leadership.

You can write a library with right design decisions and publish it on dub.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 14:30:53 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 07:35:05AM +0000, Tofu Kaitlyn via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
>> I honestly feel like D is a failure.
> [...]
>> I duno... what do yall think? Is D going to somehow explode in popularity in 5-10 years?
> [...]
>
> There lies the problem: you're equating success with popularity.  They can be correlated, to some extent, but they are certainly not the same thing.
>
> Personally, I couldn't care less about popularity. After what I've seen in the industry over the past 2-3 decades, I've become very cynical about popularity.  What I *do* care for is a language with strong technical merit. D has that, to some extent -- I'm not going to pretend D is perfect either, as I do find a lot to be desired in it.  But it's much better than the alternatives I've tried, so for the time being, it's my language of choice.
>
> But obviously, YMMV.
>

And this is the problem. Those hard core users like yourself that pretend that popularity doesn't matter. What are you going to do in 10-15 years(depending on how old you are) when Walter is dead(isn't he like 70 now?) or simply cares even less about D and moves on to dying? Popularity is what grows something.  You might not care about it, but without it D is definitely dead and it is just a matter of time.

So many users here think "I like D and it is good enough for me" not realizing that not catering to the masses is putting nails in the coffin.

See, most of you guys think that your experiences actually matter to the rest of the world, yet you won't even begin to accept their experiences. You think if it's this or that then it is.

MOST programmers are not you, you are the exception! You have an exceptional language and it will die and exceptional death. You think you are getting a great deal... D is great. But you don't realize it could be so much better. Imagine having 100k programmers using D, how much shit they would add to it. Better IDE's, better libraries, better performance, better stability, etc.

Yeah, you can ignore popularity if it it's meaningless. It just shows your ignorance or your selfishness or both.

Once the popularity of D = 0 D is dead. That is a fact. Do you want D dead? or do you like playing risky games? If you think D is so great then why would you not want it to be more popular? If D is better then C++ in every regard then why would you not want everyone using D instead of C++?

See, your perceptions are illogical and detrimental to the very thing you claim to like. You haven't really thought it all the way through. You've got to the point "It works great for me" and have stopped there. You are not the average programmer. Also, you alone cannot make D better.

It takes a village and you are scoffing at that idea like it is meaningless when it is absolute reality. All you are really doing is putting the nails in the coffin by contributing to that mentality. D has grown at a snails pace... as many new people entering in to the community, many leave. This mean's D is not really growing and without growth there is only death.

The die hard fan boys scoff at the idea of doing anything that makes D commercially appealing like having a great IDE and debugger, or making error messages make sense(such as with templates that just spew out nonsense over and over requiring one to spend more than a few seconds to figure out what is going on UNLESS they have been programming in D for a few years(which means most people will give up on D pretty quick). Proper libraries that draw people in and work properly so that they do not experience problems which then causes them to exit.

D will not survive another decade at the rate it is going. If you truly care about it as much as you say then you might want to take heed and at least make sure I'm not right. Of course, in a decade you will have quit using D because some better language will have come out that does everything you want over D(after all, you know there are things about D you do not like)... but someone else will fill your place and say the same nonsense like "D is great, Does everything for me, I don't care about popularity!" as if we are talking about a popularity contest then what what is really mean, which is the growth of D in to a real force in the programming world. You would think Walter, of all people, would care about such things but he seems to be like you.

D is dead, at least it is on deaths door, you can stick your head in the sand and pretend it isn't, the mere fact these topics come up over and over proves it. You don't see C++ having such topics in any serious manner. It's the industrial standard. Maybe in 10 years it will start to happen, but D has had this conversation over 5 years ago.

See, it is not that D itself is a bad language, it is that the whole atmosphere surrounding it, how it is managed, is the problem. Some things are done well but others poorly, eventually those things that are neglected will catch up because the community seems to care not one bit about them. The cracks are getting bigger and bigger, I'm sorry you can't see them.






> T

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 14:44:06 UTC, Chris wrote:
> The blame is constantly put on the user "your expectations were too high, what did you expect?". It doesn't occur to anyone that the completely chaotic language development may turn people off? As you mentioned (high) expectations, you're indirectly admitting that D is sub-substandard. "D is great! But don't expect too much!" That's funny.

The ecosystem may be. But what is standard? Are Qt bindings standard? Can I have them for java, C# and javascript? And PHP. With visual designers for all of them. And it must be effortless too.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 11:52:18 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 09:56:48 UTC, Nierjerson wrote:
>> [...]
>
> Well, what can I say that hasn't been said before (including this thread)? Since I said good-bye to D last year my productivity has increased incredibly. I read a few days ago that Joakim had left the community (he once asked me why my attitude had changed so drastically). And you know what, it made me kinda sad. Do things like that even register with the D Foundation  and / or community? One answer was "this would be an excellent topic for this year's GSoC", which is a total and utter lack of respect (although I hasten to say that I think the poster wasn't aware of this and didn't intend it this way). It has never occurred to the D leadership that Android and iOS are more important to developers than introducing yet another RefFancyTemplateCTFERangeAllocator which is memory safe, but not really, but it will be after DIP2001.
>
> [...]

I understand your feeling, but I think that D is approaching a pivotal point: the recent post of Andrei and Walter on the forum are fresh air to breath...

On one point I agree: It's time to get rid of all the wrong decisions done in the past, and simplify the language, founding it over the strong points learned from D2.

It's time for D3.

- Paolo

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 15:25:05 UTC, Nierjerson wrote:

> And this is the problem. Those hard core users like yourself that pretend that popularity doesn't matter.

The D language is sort of like the Arch Linux community used to be (and maybe still is, but I no longer use it). New users would come in and comment "you need more GUI support", "you need to stop expecting people to compile their own software", and "your distro will never become popular with an attitude like this community". The goal of the Arch Linux project was very explicitly to provide a high quality option for users that wanted a distro following a particular philosophy. The D language offers what it offers. If anything, the complaints are that the things it offers should be of higher quality, that the project needs to scale back further.

I don't think anyone is saying we should drive away users. But that is different from saying that popularity will drive all decisions and all contributions to D.

> So many users here think "I like D and it is good enough for me" not realizing that not catering to the masses is putting nails in the coffin.

If you have a few million to contribute to hiring a team to cater to the masses, this is a sensible argument. As things currently stand, catering to the masses will not happen, because there are no resources to do so. Sun had the money to do it, the D Language Foundation does not.

> See, it is not that D itself is a bad language, it is that the whole atmosphere surrounding it, how it is managed, is the problem. Some things are done well but others poorly, eventually those things that are neglected will catch up because the community seems to care not one bit about them. The cracks are getting bigger and bigger, I'm sorry you can't see them.

To the extent that this is true, we are still constrained by reality. Without resources there is no point in talking about changes that have to happen. It's easy to come up with ideas for work other should do. It's a bit harder to come up with ideas and then make them happen.

My recommendation is that you move on to another language if you don't like the current state of affairs. I don't see it changing in the next decade. (Interpret that statement as you wish, but this is reality, there is no reason to pretend otherwise or talk about changes that "should" happen.)

The D language works very well for me. It may not work for others. And that's okay.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 15:49:48 UTC, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:


> It's time for D3.
>
> - Paolo

The first step will be to stop saying D2 almost killed the language. I was not a user of the language at that time, but my reading is that the transition was a massive screwup. If the language doesn't evolve it will die.