On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 15:29:26 UTC, Julian wrote:
> On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 15:25:50 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 15:10:35 UTC, Julian wrote:
>>
>>> [...]
>>
>> Uh, what is this talk of RefRange all about, partial constructors, but no partial destructors? There are so many broken features,
>
> So you don't have a clear idea either. This is where the discipline of
> actually listing things out and being specific can help you. Maybe
> you've had a few clear ideas, after encountering some problems, but
> then since you only ever complained them with vague language, you
> forgot what you wanted to complain about.

My biggest chagrin has always been the whole string handling issue, but seriously so many issues have come up over the year that I don't actually care to remember.

On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 15:46:11 UTC, Chris wrote:
> My biggest chagrin has always been the whole string handling issue,

Great. What's that?

On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 14:41:50 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 10:25:03 UTC, Guillaume Lathoud wrote:
>> Maybe there is a psychological explanation for the debate here - please bear with me - just speculating:
>
> It's a lot less complicated than it sounds.
>
> Some average joes (you know who they are) with zero skin in the game are given the chance to talk to incredible programmers and have them answer in a sort of ego-tripping trance.
>
> But the only way to have them answer is to troll more or less subtly, and this behaviour has been going on for years.
>
> The lesson should only be that the leadership **should not have to listen to this whole load of non-sense** from anonymous low-achievers that blame their tools. And they want things that works well to fail with them.
>
> Do you imagine half the users of python-dev publicly berating Guido, every day for anything he would says? No, because that would be incredibly ridiculous.
>
> Hence why we have so many "helpful", anonymous poster who come with bullet lists of things to do, every day. This must stop because it is neither helpful nor with good intentions.

As an occasional visitor here I tend to agree. The last batch of leadership tips comes from an outsider who preaches things done for years. He gives pages of advice on management but admits he is "not good at project management". It's just a "feeling" he has. He will contribute nothing and will be gone after having his ego-trip orgasm.

Look for good people and make a plan, what a new idea. They've been looking for people, recall Andrei's lieutenants and czars that never showed up. They've made plans, visions are since 2015:
https://wiki.dlang.org/Vision/2015H1
Looking at all docs it seems nobody worked on what's there and I'm not surprised they stopped putting them out.

On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 15:54:58 UTC, Tourist wrote:
>
> As an occasional visitor here I tend to agree.

I've described people like you exactly:
- trying to make things fail
- anonymous
- no skin in the game
- calling people names https://forum.dlang.org/post/wdywyksoobcbqdbbnbht@forum.dlang.org
  https://forum.dlang.org/post/okyuviojboxywxqmsvfy@forum.dlang.org

Why are you doing this?

On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 15:24:32 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:

> "D is failing" has the attribute of a meme, if the number of users are great, funding solify, more compilers and platform support exist than ever before (without any seasonal hype) then there is no real reason to worry about the competition.

This thread is kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. For those who think D has failed, I suggest you just sit and wait until it fails.

Just for comparison, a compiler that has failed (not the language) is OpenWatcom. Last update was in 2010. It is dead simply because there aren't any contributors and the reason is that GCC and Clang is doing a better job. Watcom was a good compiler back in its days though.

This is a list of "system programming languages" from Wikipedia.

ESPOL
PL/I
PL360
C
PL/S
BLISS
PL/8
PL-6
SYMPL
C++
Ada
D
Nim
Go
Rust
Swift

Apart from C/C++, which "system programming languages" has succeeded here?
ESPOL, PL/I, PL360, PL/S, BLISS, PL/8, PL-6, SYMPL are old and was more used when computers smelled brunt.
Ada is kind of successful but used more in military, avionics and other critical SW. Very little used outside this domain though, which is strange as it is supposed to be a safe language which is seems to be the fad of today.
Nim, following is even smaller than D. Good language but rough around the edges and not as consistent as it should be.
Rust, is that "modern" runner up and heavily promoted, the language that is safe and is going to solve everything. I disagree, I think it will not pick up because as soon you try to do something more outside the box you will hit a brick wall.
Swift and Go, in my opinion don't belong here as my interpretation of a "system programming language" is that it shouldn't be dependent on a runtime. D is kind of in this category as well but recent betterC development moved it into the system programming language category.
There are probably more but these are little used that we don't need to mention them here.

When it comes to other programming languages used for applications then competitions really stiffens up. In this league we have Python which is undoubtedly the current king among other like C#, Java, Ruby on so on. If look at Python, the success is really because it is so simple, intuitive, easy to find information, massive library support, the complete opposite of Rust why I think it is a dead end.

It is clear that C/C++ has a massive code base and users, that's why these languages are on top and no other language seem to even approach their usage. Many companies are hugely invested in C/C++ and that's why they must continue. That in mind it is absolute killer feature of D to have a C/C++ FFI that many other languages don't have. Nim, has some of this. Rust goes nuts if you talk to any other language. How many know that you can mix D with C++?

If you look at the other languages (except C/C++) do you still think D has failed? I certainly don't think so, it is right there among the competitors.

Some talk about the failure of the management of D, that might be so however I don't think it is too late to improve this.

On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 12:34:44 UTC, Tourist wrote:
> On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 08:33:29 UTC, Nicholas Wilson wrote:
>> On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 08:21:38 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> Also, upending the code base with large changes and reorganizations is not likely to get incorporated, and be aware that people can and do disagree strongly about what constitutes improvement and what doesn't. When in doubt, do a small version and see how it goes.
>>
>> The DMD codebase suffers from systemic misorganisation, both on the massive function level, and the complete lack of organisation of the files in the source directory. Small change are never going to fix those issues.
>>
>> You are trying to find a local optimum, we need to find a more global one, and that involves doing things like https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/9511#discussion_r270614236
>
> Long functions and files not "well" organized are the typical issues noticed by an incompetent maintainer.

Hahahaha!

Please, for my amusement, give me a summary of what Semantic3Visitor.visit(FuncDeclaration) does and tell me with a strait face that it took you less than 3 hours to find out.

On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 15:16:09 UTC, Tourist wrote:
> I'm going by what I see in the discussion and the links shown, not familiar with the codebase. YMMV.
>
> Walter refactors on timeless programming principles, more functional, more immutable, more encapsulation, more information hiding. You don't care for those.

No, those are useful. I think that there are more impactful things that can be done.

> You want to refactor file and directory organization

Because we have ~120 source files in the same directory that do vastly different things and alphabetic sorting doesn't work when the files name need a 'd' prepended because otherwise the module name will collide with a keyword. Its a PITA to navigate.

> fluff based on personal preference and fads.

I'm certainly not the only one who wants that.

> The greatest mistake W&A did was to get contributors incapable of doing original work.

I suggest you do some original work (and some research) before you accuse others of being incapable of original work. FYI, I wrote dcompute, and most of the DMD/Druntime/Phobos PRs merged in the last 6 months went through me.

> They bicker forever about reorganizations that do nothing.

That you think the expected value of the reorganisations is zero shows you have no idea what you're talking about. I'd recommend dropping dropping that attitude until you do.

On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 18:09:16 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
> Rust, is that "modern" runner up and heavily promoted, the language that is safe and is going to solve everything. I disagree, I think it will not pick up because as soon you try to do something more outside the box you will hit a brick wall.

Probably true. Too high level without providing high level convenience.

> among other like C#, Java, Ruby on so on. If look at Python, the success is really because it is so simple, intuitive, easy to find information, massive library support, the complete opposite of Rust why I think it is a dead end.

Python has also improved with (optional) static typing capabilities.  I am sure many people run Python on embedded devices without telling anyone...

> It is clear that C/C++ has a massive code base and users, that's why these languages are on top and no other language seem to even approach their usage. Many companies are hugely invested in C/C++ and that's why they must continue.

Not only that, but hardware manufacturers provide support for them...

> Nim, has some of this.

Compiling to C is a good option, but Walter has always been very much against it.

> Rust goes nuts if you talk to any other language.

Really? It interfaces with C doesn't it?

> If you look at the other languages (except C/C++) do you still think D has failed? I certainly don't think so, it is right there among the competitors.

A system level programming language is not a success until at least one notable manufacturerer or consulting company supports it in some way. IMHO.

On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 14:41:50 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> Do you imagine half the users of python-dev publicly berating Guido, every day for anything he would says? No, because that would be incredibly ridiculous.


Actually it did happen, and was called out immediately:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-February/033056.html

On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 09:42:01 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> It's true that there's a high barrier to entry in the beginning with D - much better now, but if you are put off by discomfort and needing to figure things out for yourself then it's going to be quite a tough experience.  D doesn't place a high value on being accessible and if that's what is important then maybe somewhere else would be a better fit.

Interesting. This appears to be a common sentiment, but it's opposite of mine and many other folks I talk to. I've programmed in a number of languages, and I'd say that Python is easier to get started in, but that most other languages are materially harder.

Might be useful to understand why some people find D easy and others find it hard. It could be related to past programming experience, but also might be related to the types of tasks being performed, the way people learn, or differences in approach to programming. (e.g. Perhaps early success or not is being determined by role the ecosystem plays in initial tasks chosen or programming approach used.) This is a material topic because programming model simplicity is, or should be, a strength of D.

> Yes - the tolerance for experimentation is an important question.
>  In firms where there isn't much of a tolerance for experimenting and for some of those experiments to fail then it's probably not the right environment to use D.  But I think the more interesting places to work are quite different.

The computing landscape is changing rapidly, and there are many technologies companies need to consider experimental investments in, not just programming languages. In effect, when it comes to investments in advanced/experimental technology a company might choose to make, programming languages are competing with many other technologies, not just other programming languages.