On Sunday, 10 January 2021 at 22:23:59 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grostad wrote:
> On Sunday, 10 January 2021 at 20:33:45 UTC, Andre Pany wrote:
>> On Sunday, 10 January 2021 at 20:13:46 UTC, John wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
>> This is not true, if you keep an eye on the druntime/dmd PR, you will see that a lot of them are about refactorings and code clean up.
>
> Uhm, you just listed features D don't need: string interpolation, named arguments and string conversion in a runtime (stupid idea).
>  The runtime should be slimmed down to a bare minimum. The type system should be fixed. Memory management and shared should be finalized. If that requires refactorning, great. Aaron certainly has a point.

string interpolation and named arguments are pretty useful, not familiar with the final one.

On Sunday, 10 January 2021 at 22:33:32 UTC, Max Haughton wrote:
> On Sunday, 10 January 2021 at 22:23:59 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grostad wrote:
>> On Sunday, 10 January 2021 at 20:33:45 UTC, Andre Pany wrote:
>>> On Sunday, 10 January 2021 at 20:13:46 UTC, John wrote:
>>>> [...]
>>>
>>> This is not true, if you keep an eye on the druntime/dmd PR, you will see that a lot of them are about refactorings and code clean up.
>>
>> Uhm, you just listed features D don't need: string interpolation, named arguments and string conversion in a runtime (stupid idea).
>>  The runtime should be slimmed down to a bare minimum. The type system should be fixed. Memory management and shared should be finalized. If that requires refactorning, great. Aaron certainly has a point.
>
> string interpolation and named arguments are pretty useful, not familiar with the final one.

Floating point to string conversion is currently solved by calling a C function. This leads to various consequences: ctfe, purity and it is even mentioned in the "string interpolation dip" as limitation.

Kind regards
Andre

On Sunday, 10 January 2021 at 22:33:32 UTC, Max Haughton wrote:
> On Sunday, 10 January 2021 at 22:23:59 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grostad wrote:
> string interpolation and named arguments are pretty useful, not familiar with the final one.

Everything is useful if you need it, but you cannot both have success restructuring and adding features at the same time. Fixing core issues are critically important, other stuff can be left to experimental compiler branches. Dont merge in more stuff until the core is solid. I think this is a pretty basic development strategy.

On Friday, 8 January 2021 at 16:26:43 UTC, Marcone wrote:
> I've been a programmer for 15 years. I program in several programming languages, only for Windows desktop with graphical interface. I have been programming in D for only 1 year and for me D is the best programming language. Why not invest more in Dlang? Better integration of D with Qt5 and Qt6 and the web would make Dlang rise in popularity.

Yeah, D rocks, boulders even.

One problem though is the upstream experience. Devs fork D and the changes doesn't get back in again. That experience needs to improve somehow

The impression I have is that everything in D is difficult, old, obsolete and abandoned. I hope someday those responsible for D will invest in IDE, integration with Qt, and with Qt Designer to convert .ui to .d and a way to use packages that is as easy as in Python, because the dub is very bad.

On Wednesday, 13 January 2021 at 00:51:35 UTC, Marcone wrote:
> The impression I have is that everything in D is difficult, old, obsolete and abandoned. I hope someday those responsible for D will invest in IDE, integration with Qt, and with Qt Designer to convert .ui to .d and a way to use packages that is as easy as in Python, because the dub is very bad.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Open Source!

Ok no time for celebrations, since unlike corporate backed languages D is poor, all of those things will not happen just because someone asked, it may sound harsh but "if you need it - you make it, or pay someone to make it", that's what everyone says on that forum. And I mean they are not wrong. For example if thing X is exist in language A and thing Y is super easy to use that's because someone had to make it happen, and when nobody wants to make those nasty things the last argument is money, which you already probably guessed D lacks.

And even with all that I disagree with that D is difficult and obsolete, for a teenager who will never code without IDE and simply doesn't care how computer/compilers/languages works? Maybe. For anyone who started with notepad as their IDE and crawled up on the hill of proficiency? No.

On Wednesday, 13 January 2021 at 06:11:14 UTC, evilrat wrote:
> On Wednesday, 13 January 2021 at 00:51:35 UTC, Marcone wrote:
>...
>
> And even with all that I disagree with that D is difficult and obsolete, for a teenager who will never code without IDE and simply doesn't care how computer/compilers/languages works? Maybe. For anyone who started with notepad as their IDE and crawled up on the hill of proficiency? No.

Except that teenagers can also start businesses, and are the decision makers from tomorrow, so why bother cater to them anyway.

On Wednesday, 13 January 2021 at 06:11:14 UTC, evilrat wrote:
> On Wednesday, 13 January 2021 at 00:51:35 UTC, Marcone wrote:
>> The impression I have is that everything in D is difficult, old, obsolete and abandoned. I hope someday those responsible for D will invest in IDE, integration with Qt, and with Qt Designer to convert .ui to .d and a way to use packages that is as easy as in Python, because the dub is very bad.
>
> Welcome to the wonderful world of Open Source!
>
> Ok no time for celebrations, since unlike corporate backed languages D is poor, all of those things will not happen just because someone asked, it may sound harsh but "if you need it - you make it, or pay someone to make it", that's what everyone says on that forum. And I mean they are not wrong. For example if thing X is exist in language A and thing Y is super easy to use that's because someone had to make it happen, and when nobody wants to make those nasty things the last argument is money, which you already probably guessed D lacks.

This is all true, but the fact remains that some open source projects do a better job of working with contributors than others.

D's leadership is almost legendarily bad at communicating openly and effectively with contributors, and the result is that despite having a community full of skilled and motivated developers, progress on important projects is often slow to nonexistent. The most recent example of this is Timon Gehr's tuple DIP, which is currently stalled due to "lack of enthusiasm from decision makers." [1] When someone like Timon shows up to volunteer his time and skills for your project, how arrogant and/or incompetent do you have to be to essentially slam the door in his face?

People talk about "lack of volunteers," but the truth is that D *vastly* under-utilizes the volunteer resources it has already. That's the bottleneck in the current system, and that's what needs to be fixed if we want D to continue growing.

[1] https://forum.dlang.org/post/rsrlkq$1nu0$1@digitalmars.com

On 1/13/21 10:21 AM, Paul Backus wrote:
> 
> D *vastly* under-utilizes the volunteer resources it has already.
> 

exactly

On Wednesday, 13 January 2021 at 07:21:26 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
>
> D's leadership is almost legendarily bad at communicating openly and effectively with contributors
> ...

Yes, there may be serious organizational/management problems, but the language itself is so cool.
Being open source also means that it is possible that someone makes a fork with better management and vision and it might succeed, but on the other hand I hope this not happen any time soon, as D is barely living and such split might actually sink both projects.

Heck, even I myself was thinking about making my own 'Better D' transpiler with new fancy sugar such as optional semicolon, fancy null conditional and null coalescing operators (aka ?. and ?? in C#) and such.
Thanks to dmd as a library this might be even possible as a one man project.