On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 15:46:45 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> 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.

Qt it's covering it's field pretty well...

PHP? You can stream a QT UI from an embedded ARM device to you iPad via WebGL *right now*: it's covering the need to use it from a browser.

Javascript? Qt QML can use javascript libraries,  *right now*: it's covering the need to use the enormous amount of JS code for spice the UI

Qt bindings for C# Java? For what usage? Qt has python bindings since long time, and they are now official supported bindings till 5.12, the LTS release: they are covering QT usage from the enormous ecosystem that's python.

The visual designer part of the QT Creator is not perfect, but I've used it personally to design the UI of a PySide (PyQT) SQL application more than *ten years ago*: they are covering the Designer needs.

With a clever modification of C++ (signal / slot) and a clever, consistent *battery included* standard library (yes, the "old way" of thinking about standard libraries) they are simply dominating a huge market...

- P

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 15:58:54 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> 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.

The transition between D1 and D2 was problematic, that's true, (but the problem was the duality between Phobos/Tango), but happened, successfully at the end.

The transition between Python 2 and Python 3 was problematic, but happened, and Python is flourishing...  does it worth? Being someone who worked with Python strings / bytes in both 2 and 3, yes, it worths!

- P

On 12.04.19 17:25, Nierjerson wrote:
> 
> Yeah, you can ignore popularity if it it's meaningless.

That seems obvious.

> It just shows your ignorance or your selfishness or both.
> ...

Right, because supporting an open source language and toolchain is so selfish and ignorant. I won't try to force you to use it for your own good. If that's selfish, so be it.

> Once the popularity of D = 0 D is dead. That is a fact.

As long as I am using it, the popularity of D ≠ 0. Fact.
(In fact, D has plenty of users.)

> If you think D is so great 

It's fine, not great, but better than would-be competitors for my current use cases.

> then why would you not want it to be more popular?

When everything else is the same, having more users is a liability.
In any case, if you want to invest time and effort into a marketing campaign, be my guest. I'm not actively opposed to popularity, even though it would probably further diminish the average quality of discourse on the forums.

> If D is better then C++ in every regard

(That's not even close to what anyone in this thread claimed.)

> then why would you not want everyone using D instead of C++?
> ...

Competitive advantage.

> See, your perceptions are illogical and detrimental to the very thing you claim to like.

D is a tool. You are arguing as if it was a person whom I wish to marry.

On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 03:25:05PM +0000, Nierjerson via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 14:30:53 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
[...]
> > 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?

There are enough of us around to keep it going without Walter, and that number is growing.  It may not be growing as fast as you might want, but it's growing.


> 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.

Bold statement for a language that has a good number of companies using it in production, with a small group of dedicated contributors.  Yeah, it may be no C++ megalith, but honestly? I can live with that. In fact, I like it.  Popularity usually also equates to lowering your standards to the lowest common denominator.  I've seen enough of that in my career to be extremely cynical about it.


[...]
> 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++?
[...]

Ah, the good old strawman argument. I never said I don't *want* D to be popular.  I said that popularity is irrelevant *to me*.  I want D to grow *by technical merit*, not than by pandering to whatever fashion trend the masses are clamoring for today that will inevitably change again tomorrow. Popularity is not a reliable measure of technical merit.


> 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 be honest, I've seriously thought about forking D on several occasions.  I haven't gone through with it yet, for many reasons.  But if push comes to shove, I'm ready to take it on, and I'm pretty certain that I'm not alone.


T

-- 
People say I'm arrogant, and I'm proud of it.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 15:52:17 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> 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.

Um, Everything offers what it offers. It is nonsensical response because it is always true and hence says nothing about what D does.

Why would anyone put in years of their life in to something just to throw it away?

If D's goal was to provide a few decades of a marginal language, then it has achieved that, but I somehow doubt that was what it was written for.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019?utm_source=so-owned&utm_medium=announcement-banner&utm_campaign=dev-survey-2019

You can see that D doesn't show up at all anywhere and also what most programmers do and expect. If one is serious about creating useful programming platform, to ignore such things is ignorant and detrimental.



> 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.

I never said that. I said popularity brings benefits and popularity IS required for longevity. Popularity is longevity. Popularity is a function of time AND when it reaches 0 then what the popularity represents is dead.

What I'm saying is those that believe D will survive and be a useful platform and ignore all the things that drive useful platforms is being ignorant. No one knows exactly what it takes to make anything successful, but there are fundamental principles involved and when they are ignored then there is no success.



>> 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.
>

No, your argument is not sensible. Why? Because the only way to cater to the masses is to cater to them.  You say there are no resources... why? Because You haven't fucking catered to the masses. What do you expect, a flip to switch and then the masses come?

That is not how things work. It must be built. If the D community gave a rates ass about the bigger picture, it would have done things that would have attracted more people, then those people would then contribute more, and it would feed back in to itself. It D this to some degree but only attracted more die hard programmers who were willing to invest their time or hoped for the best.

D has had 20 years to build a huge community and it has failed. It's simple as that... the reason why it has failed is because building a large community was never accepted as necessary to help D progress.

With most language, or anything really, when you have 1M people using it, they will create shit for it on their own without any regard for anything. This is what humans do. D has had that. But D never had 1M, it might have had 10k at most. That means the maximum that can be achieved is from 10k, not 1M, or 10M, or 100M. So D has shot itself in the head by not making community building apart of it's plan of success.

The attitude "We will not cater to the mass of moron programmers" has hurt D, possibly been the one thing that is killing it.

I see many of you guys that refuse to accept the need to proper tooling that appeals to the masses. You pretend that all the new programmers that could help D thrive who are used to using GUI's and tooling of modern languages should be forced to use tooling 20+ years ago.


Most new programmers who are looking for languages to latch on to are kids who have certain mentalities and ideas... and trying to force them to go back in time isn't going to attract them. There is a huge misconception in by the management and leadership of D related to this.


Oh, and to pretend the masses don't matter yet here and there one of the leaders will post stats about how D is becoming more popular. So, yes they do think about it but no the increase is not significant.


>> 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.


AGAIN, the reason why there are no resources is BECAUSE you don't have the people BECAUSE you don't attract the people. It is not a switch!!! It is a process. You do shit to attract people, some come, then you take those people and do some more shit and more people come, and so forth. When you do the WRONG shit, you don't attract anyone AND so you MUST stop doing that. The management loves to do the wrong shit and pretend it is right.

and THIS is why D will die. Because it has not built up over the 20 years the resources it could have now. It is a rocket that didn't have enough thrust to get escape velocity. At some point it will start falling. [The difference is that a rocket can't change but management can]

Your logic is exactly this: "I have no money so I can't be a millionaire which will let me make more money". It's nonsensical.

The only way to make money is to make money, the millions come from that process.

If D focused more on building a larger community then it more people will come and the community will grow and more things will happen such as more resources(which, for programming is 99% human effort so it is PURELY humans that are required).


> 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.)
>

I already have. I only use D for minor things that it works well for. I do not use it for anything serious any more. It's cut my productivity by a quarter if not more. I have over 10 languages I program in and D is my last choice for anything that involves $$$ and complexity. And guess what! It's all precisely due to the tooling. The language itself impedes me very little(there are problems here and there but it seems have become much more stable than it was when I first started using it).


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

Yep, exactly, and that is why you are part of the problem. This is why I stopped taking D seriously. Because it's all the people in the community are "It's about me, Id on't give a shit about you!" attitude. See, you are not the first one that has said that in this thread. I've seen it by two other people.

It's people like you that are the problem. One day you will reap what you sow. You have invested years in to D, probably suck at most other languages now, and when D falls through(What happens when Walter dies? It's coming, it's not a macabre thing, it's just a fact of life) what are you going to do? Are you going to take it over and keep the train going? Do you think the rest of the guys are going to help you? How many people you got? how many will it take?

What I tend to find in the D community is a lot of people with no real understanding of how project management works and the real issues projects face. They don't understand complexity nor simplicity. It's true that they understand these things better that most programmers such as most JS programmers, but most JS programmers don't have any control in any way what so ever about their language.

With D, people like you get to reinforce the illogical mentalities of the management and so actually do much harm to the success of D. You can't be told other wise because you are right. You won't listen to facts, even facts that you know are true and state yourself. You always find some justification that does not prove your conclusions wrong.

D as a language is great, D as a community/management is terrible. There is a huge imbalance between the two and unfortunately D won't survive the latter[Although someone might come along and reincarnate it in to something new, that can't be bet on to have any significance].

If you actually look at the D forums you will see only maybe 40 active regulars. Seriously, at MOST. Even if we make that in to 1000, or 10000, it compares NOTHING to the main language D competes against. C++ has hundreds of millions of active regulars in forums all across the web.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/d

Look how dead it is! Your perception is not reality. You can pretend everything is peachy perfect but the facts show that you are blind... and you are digging your own grave(D wise).

It is not pessimism to speak the truth. I want D to succeed just as much as anyone else here, but it isn't. I'm stating these things to try to wake up people like you so that maybe you will change and get with the program to try and save D, but like most things, you will choose to ignore reality until it strangles you and you are forced to realize what has happened.

Even, if I'm exaggerating, even if the numbers were all off by a few orders of magnitude, they are still far too low compared to comparable languages or where D should be by now.

It is people like you that are the problem. I truly don't think you get it. I think your logic is warped and you conclude the wrong things. I could be wrong and I'm not saying you are moron or that everything you conclude is wrong... but in certain things you either fail to be logical or fail to measure correctly(you over or under estimate and then never double check yourself by converse logic to see if you are even in the same ball bark as the truth).


..and, basically you have already said it, as others have, you don't really care... and that, ultimately, is the real problem. You simply do not care enough about D to criticize it enough to have it do better. If you raised kids your parenting style is "Go out and play, you can do your homework tomorrow" because you really don't care enough about your kids to do the hard work so that it pays off for you and them. I feel Walter is in that boat and many others. It's as if you guys really think it's suppose to be easy and everything is suppose to just magically come together without any blood sweat and tears. It really has nothing to do with D ultimately, it is just the thing we happen to all cross paths with. If we were in another universe it would be a similar thing but over something different. It seems to be a human thing when the human mind just ultimately gives up the war and only fights the battles to safe face or to keep the charade going on.

On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 04:31:51PM +0000, Paolo Invernizzi via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 15:58:54 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> > 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.

+1.

This is why I heartily support Andrei's recent stance about std.v2.  I don't agree with his claim that it can't be done because of our present (lack of) manpower.  There are other issues involved with that, that I don't want to get into here, but D really needs to embrace change rather than fear it.  Trying to get something as complex as a programming language right from the get-go is impossible.  What you lay down at first can only be an approximation at best, and is bound to need revision later as your direction becomes clearer.  Whatever D started out as was only a faint shadow of what it became today, and similarly what we have today is only a faint shadow of what it might become in the future.  The moment we let the past stop the future is the moment D is dead.


> The transition between D1 and D2 was problematic, that's true, (but the problem was the duality between Phobos/Tango), but happened, successfully at the end.
> 
> The transition between Python 2 and Python 3 was problematic, but happened, and Python is flourishing...  does it worth? Being someone who worked with Python strings / bytes in both 2 and 3, yes, it worths!
[...]

Yes, and I hope std.v2 will happen. And not just happen, I hope there will be a std.v3 in the future, and a std.v4 in the distant future.


T

-- 
Not all rumours are as misleading as this one.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 15:52:17 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 15:25:05 UTC, Nierjerson wrote:
>

> 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.)
>
no, i am not a troll!
but this is the kind of group treatment that makes you guys famous.
it works for you hobbyists, so who are other idiots.

> The D language works very well for me. It may not work for others. And that's okay.
for you privately it works well - ok. does it have a chance for companies?
no

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
> 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 at ACCU ATM and most of the people I've talked to about have heard of it,

> I duno... what do yall think? Is D going to somehow explode in popularity in 5-10 years? Am I missing some part of the picture? Or am I right and if so what can be done about it?

If the vision can be revitalised and the processes streamlined to extract value out of ideas then it has a great future. If not, well...

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 16:45:04 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 03:25:05PM +0000, Nierjerson via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 14:30:53 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> [...]
>> > 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?
>
> There are enough of us around to keep it going without Walter, and that number is growing.  It may not be growing as fast as you might want, but it's growing.

Even one man can "keep it going" in theory. In practice that is now how it works. When the "team leader" goes everything almost always falls apart. In war, if the commander gets killed there are specific processes to deal with the inevitable outcome of the company being obliterated. This is why their are chains of command and shut. You won't be able to keep anything together in any significant way without some organized structure. It is pipe dream because EVEN if it were true, it is only true in theory or in some astronomical chance. In reality, that is, when we want to actually not take huge risks, things work a certain way.

It has nothing to do with D specifically, it is true in general for all things. It is not that the outcome is always known but that why go down that path? It doesn't have to go that way and it will only be a tough road. There is no point except to be lazy and ignorant. Proper planning is what has proven itself time and again in all complex things. No need to throw it out the window just because you guys want to gamble.


>
>> 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.
>
> Bold statement for a language that has a good number of companies using it in production, with a small group of dedicated contributors.  Yeah, it may be no C++ megalith, but honestly? I can live with that. In fact, I like it.  Popularity usually also equates to lowering your standards to the lowest common denominator.  I've seen enough of that in my career to be extremely cynical about it.

Seriously? You do realize that the companies that use D are a drop in the bucket compared to most other popular languages? Also, most of these companies would drop D in a heart beat if something better came along to make them more money.

Look, this is what you are saying: "Too much `popularity` is bad because of X, I've seen it in the past so we won't have any popularity".

That makes no sense. How bout you find a better way to do it? I agree that popularity in and of itself is not necessarily good, but the right popularity is the best. What if D had a community of 1M programmers that were identical to you? Would you not accept it because it's too popular? Or would you all start making D the most amazing language and compiler that you can conceive of?

You are throwing out the baby with the bath water. There has to be a balance in everything. To choose an extreme is idiotic all virtually all cases no matter hat the extreme is. Choosing one extreme over some other is just as bad as choosing another extreme over some other extreme. [i.e., saying "My extreme is better than yours" is a destructive statement unless it can be proved mathematically to be true or beyond all meaningful doubt]

>
> [...]
>> 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++?
> [...]
>
> Ah, the good old strawman argument. I never said I don't *want* D to be popular.  I said that popularity is irrelevant *to me*.
>  I want D to grow *by technical merit*, not than by pandering to whatever fashion trend the masses are clamoring for today that will inevitably change again tomorrow. Popularity is not a reliable measure of technical merit.

It is not a straw man. It is fact. I didn't say you wanted it, you might not verbalize that or even believe that is what you want, but actions are what counts. If your actions causally lead to a specific outcome(and all things are cause and effect) then you wanted it whether you realize it or not.

For example, if a girl has sex with a boy not realizing that she will get pregnant and it will potentially ruin her life, she has set up a domino effect and the outcome, while not 100% is statistically determinable... and if she ignores that she will become a statistic.


Do you agree with me that if no one uses D in any way shape or form, by I which I mean popularity(t) = 0 for all t > T, then D is what we could say is "dead"?

If so then D's popularity is related to it's heath. You can't argue that and if your logic does not in some way conform to the constraint above, you will almost surely be hurting D than helping it.

My point IS NOT that D should just base everything on popularity. That is not what I'm arguing at all. What I am arguing is that without some focus on it D is doing far more damage than good and eventually it will catch up with it. I'm also not saying that D has 0 focus on "popularity", I'm simply saying that there is a very significant likelihood that D's lack of focus on building community is significantly hurting it's growth(growth in it's capabilities that all D users can benefit from, including you).



>
>> 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 be honest, I've seriously thought about forking D on several occasions.  I haven't gone through with it yet, for many reasons.  But if push comes to shove, I'm ready to take it on, and I'm pretty certain that I'm not alone.
>

And that alone proves there is something fundamentally wrong with D's community. Why would you ever even think about that if the community was properly functioning?

I have not only thought about forking D but writing my own compiler. The problem is I know I'm not willing to put in the effort to make it successful because it is just too much work for me(and I'm real with myself about it). I've had many long years been wanting a compiler that I works the way I believe compilers should, take all the short comings of all the languages I have learned and with all the things I have learned and try to make something better. But it is a long process because I would go in to uncharted territory. I don't believe in having to follow the status quo and I'd solely write the compiler for myself. It would be a 10-20 year project, an investment I am not willing to make.

Imagine this: Take any aspect of D, be it an audio library, an IDE, debugging, whatever... imagine it was as far ahead of what else is out there in the same way it is ahead with it's meta programming. This is how D should be as a goal. Rather than "Our meta programming is light years head of everything else but everything else we do is light years beyond anything else". I realize it is a pipe dream, but without dreaming reality never changes.

It's as If D one a trophy for it's meta programming and said "We won! Time to go home!" and stopped competing in everything else.

I really believe the leadership believes there are only a few aspects of D that matters like it's meta programming or it's stability and that everything else is irrelevant. I think they believe this precisely in the same way that you and others believe in D: "It works for me"... so, audio people are ignored because the leadership doesn't do audio, so it's irrelevant do them. Graphics are ignored because the leaders only use and write programs and code in text. These things then only get any support from individuals that say "Man, I love D but I need X" and so create X themselves. This approach then creates a huge mess for many reasons(maintenance, integrability, cohesiveness, etc).

I'm not trying to pain the picture that D sucks all around, just that D could do a lot better in it's weakest areas instead of essentially ignoring them. Remember, something is only as strong as it's weakest link. It is tautological. It can't be argued. It means that if D wants to be strong it should work on it's weak points and not sweep them under the rug.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 16:49:02 UTC, Nierjerson wrote:
> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 15:52:17 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>> [...]
>
> Um, Everything offers what it offers. It is nonsensical response because it is always true and hence says nothing about what D does.
>
> [...]

you are absolutely wright. i wished i could express this a good as you do, but english is not my native language.

but aren't all you guys stunned how Andrei and Walter come to rescue of there creation and failed management?
what a yelling silence.
well this is the usual way - stand by and/or don't care. the idiots will calm down after they are made trolls or are told to move on.
should we?