On Friday, August 11, 2017 08:13:07 SC via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Wednesday, 9 August 2017 at 22:17:42 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
> > Regardless, we're here because we want a quality language, not because we want a popular one. We just hope that those two things aren't mutually exclusive.
>
> i agree about quality part, but you mix two things, popularity and the need of tooling
>
> the point of my post was to gather community in hope for better tooling, not popularity
>
> having great tooling might increase popularity, but for me it'll improve my productivity, and that's all i care about, popularity is next, quality is already nice for me

Good tooling is important, but it differs significantly from person to person which sets of tools matter or would be useful, and I think that to a great extent, the core developers have the tooling that they're looking for. I'm sure that if we had to come up with a list of things that we'd like to see improved with regards to tooling, we'd be able to, but something like IDE support? Most of us don't use or care about IDEs. Rather, we just use text editors like vim and emacs - or sublime. It does come up periodically that someone thinks that an IDE is critical to developing in D, but most of the folks who are involved enough to be contributing don't think that way. There are definitely some folks around here who care about IDEs, and there are several projects that bring D support to IDEs (such as Visual-D for Visual Studio), so I'm sure that some folks would care about whatever Jetbrains or anyone else is up to with IDEs and D, but most of us really don't care. If they have great D support, and that helps someone, then great. I don't think that you'll find anyone here who's against that, but most of us simply are not going to put time and effort into trying to improve IDE support or trying to get someone else to, because we wouldn't use any of it.

So, feel free to point out what Jetbrains has done with regards to Rust and encourage anyone who cares to speak up and tell Jetbrains that they want something similar for D - having that sort of support certainly would not be detrimental to the D community - but a large percentage of the folks around here really aren't going to care, because it wouldn't help them at all.

Most of the tooling stuff that folks around here are likely to care about has more to do with building software or finding bugs in it, not writing code. For most of us, that's what programs like vim and emacs are for.

Historically, something like writing a D plugin for IDE has happened because someone who wanted that support for themselves has stepped up and provided it to the community. The same goes for most standard library additions. Standing up and saying that you want someone else to do something rarely gets anything done around here. It's almost always about someone contributing what they think is important and are able and willing to spend the time to implement and contribute.

- Jonathan M Davis