On Tuesday, 1 December 2015 at 09:47:05 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> A more condensed bi-weekly would look more interesting to visitors.

I actually think weekly pull request reports and such aren't all that interesting at all, that's why I like to do the tips and try to summarize things that might influence the future direction of D.

That's why, when I'm done talking about a thread, I usually give my opinion on where I think it is doing, like "it is unlikely anything will change as a result of this". We every so often try to publish roadmaps, but my experience has been that we get a better idea of where things are going by watching what topics come up more for discussion. And not just length of discussion or frequency of threads, but the attitude we see inside from a few key members.

....whoa, I just realized this is relevant to a proprietary project I'm working on.... weird that I didn't realize that until now...

Anyway though, I've been on the forum for a lot of years and have seen where the language has been and just try to distill that into where it is going too.



The other big thing is that I want to talk about where it is *now* instead of just what's happening this week. That's why there's tips, project write-ups, interviews, etc.

TWID's audience includes visitors, but its core are already D users at varying levels of activity who don't necessarily know all these things but want to.

On Tuesday, 1 December 2015 at 14:58:09 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Tuesday, 1 December 2015 at 14:53:10 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 1 December 2015 at 07:34:49 UTC, ketmar wrote:
>>> that's great: less SJW and other unstable persons.
>>
>> FYI, I am called am SJW by a lot of people.
>
> And that's a good thing!

I don't know, if it's a good thing ;)

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=SJW

On Tuesday, 1 December 2015 at 07:34:49 UTC, ketmar wrote:
> On Monday, 30 November 2015 at 21:52:34 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>> You have 3 seconds to convince a random visitor that the site is worth his/her time. If I am looking for a tool the last thing I want is to try to download something from an emotional boy scouts club.
> that's great: less SJW and other unstable persons. if someone is judging *programming* *language* with 3-second look at the site... well, i'd better not have such person on board.

+1

/P

On Tuesday, 1 December 2015 at 10:22:35 UTC, Chris wrote:
> I liked this line
>
> "And, the thread many of you have been waiting to hear about... "

Yeah, there were a few people who asked me what I was going to say on it. (BTW, the D community as I see it, isn't just the forums. I also am on the Stack Overflow questions, the IRC channel (which is currently down apparently, freenode keeps disconnecting me, ugh), sometimes FB/reddit/etc., and there's quite a few people who privately email me. And, of course, the people I actually talk to regularly are just a small fraction of the community as a whole too, and TWID's readership.

Sometimes, we on the forum think we're everybody, but we're really just the upper 1% of D's users in terms of activity level. We, generally speaking, aren't even the ones who *use* it most, just the ones who talk the most.)


But since the impression I got was a lot of people wanted to hear about it, I put something up.



So, at the weekly work meeting I talked about in my last post, one of the questions the manager always asks is "what can we improve", and he usually starts by saying something he felt he did wrong this week. Then the floor is open to all of us to suggest process changes or whatever to help prevent whatever we felt went wrong this week from happening next week.

The goal of this isn't to say "Brian is an idiot", but rather to say like "I'd like if Brian chatted a bit more so we know what's on his mind because I didn't understand why he made that change on Wednesday".

The goal is to get our problems in the open so we can talk about fixing it rather than to just hate each other. It is great that the manager often starts with a bit of self-criticism because that shows that he is open to it too, that we should be free to say whatever is on our minds, that it is his responsibility to keep things flowing smoothly and it isn't a blame game nor a suck up to the boss moment.



My last comment that we need better communication is along those same lines. There were a lot of misunderstandings in that thread that could be solved with more proactive communication. But, also, let's be fair, Andrei is a busy man and can't be seriously expected to read every post on every forum. (I didn't know much about the SDLang decision either, though I knew it was in for some time because I saw support requests come up. But I'm not really a dub user personally and don't follow their forums.)

So, we as a community, need to find some good way to distill these things to a list of things that might happen that busy people can keep up with and discuss before it becomes too big.


I'm trying to provide that with This Week in D, but we can surely do better!


tl;dr: as an action item on this, please email me if I forget to mention some decision in the Major Changes section. At least we can list things there and hopefully see+talk about it before it becomes too late.

On Tuesday, 1 December 2015 at 15:11:53 UTC, Chris wrote:
> I don't know, if it's a good thing ;)

The term itself is fairly silly and it is thrown around quite a bit... but my point is just that we shouldn't dismiss people so easily, especially when we have an easy fix. If changing a word or two will bring us a few more people without costing anything else, let's just do it. Not worth arguing over.

Besides, one of those SJWs with a busy schedule could be a genius!

On Tuesday, 1 December 2015 at 15:04:48 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> I actually think weekly pull request reports and such aren't all that interesting at all, that's why I like to do the tips and try to summarize things that might influence the future direction of D.

Yes, tips are really cool and probably a good reason for people to read it. Forward looking "tidbits" are good and fun too.

> topics come up more for discussion. And not just length of discussion or frequency of threads, but the attitude we see inside from a few key members.

Sure.

> TWID's audience includes visitors, but its core are already D users at varying levels of activity who don't necessarily know all these things but want to.

It _is_ challenging to write for many different types of readers, newbies vs oldbies, random visitors that want to know status quo and which one want to appear attractive to, computer scientists vs teenagers etc. It is indeed much easier to write for a narrow group.

Personally I feel the downside of having a weekly issue is that only a couple of things "happen" each week. So a random person or more passive D user will get less of a sense that "things are happening". The upside is that active D users get something predictable each week. I only write from the perspective of  appealing to "critical programmers" at the front page.

Other languages also have websites that rub me the wrong way by being "too personal" too (which implies small and unfinished). I think Rust does pretty well by taking the "clean technical information hub" approach, but that has nothing to do with the newsletter. :)

On Tuesday, 1 December 2015 at 15:11:53 UTC, Chris wrote:
> I don't know, if it's a good thing ;)
>
> http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=SJW

Oh well. My interpretation of the term was a lot more flattering...

On Tuesday, 1 December 2015 at 15:41:06 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Tuesday, 1 December 2015 at 15:11:53 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> I don't know, if it's a good thing ;)
>
> The term itself is fairly silly and it is thrown around quite a bit... but my point is just that we shouldn't dismiss people so easily, especially when we have an easy fix. If changing a word or two will bring us a few more people without costing anything else, let's just do it. Not worth arguing over.

I understand, but there will always be SJW or PCW who take offence, no matter how careful you are.

> Besides, one of those SJWs with a busy schedule could be a genius!

If they are SJWs according to the definition(s) I linked to above, I doubt that you will find a genius among them ;)

On Tuesday, 1 December 2015 at 07:34:49 UTC, ketmar wrote:


FYI I pushed your patch to simpledisplay up to github with a few minor changes (it didn't compile on Windows).

Gotta do more to it but you might want to pull down so if you do more modifications we'll be on the same base.

(i hate that irc is down still, ugh!)

On Tue, 01 Dec 2015 07:34:48 +0000, ketmar wrote:

> On Monday, 30 November 2015 at 21:52:34 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>> You have 3 seconds to convince a random visitor that the site is worth his/her time. If I am looking for a tool the last thing I want is to try to download something from an emotional boy scouts club.
> that's great: less SJW and other unstable persons. if someone is judging *programming* *language* with 3-second look at the site... well, i'd better not have such person on board.

The pejorative denotation of the term "SJW", judging by explicit definitions, seems to describe something I've never seen. People getting offended at everything possible while ignoring social issues -- well, okay, the "Happy Holidays" vs "Merry Christmas" wars, but that's a typically conservative thing to get worked up about, and the SJW stereotype is liberal rather than conservative.

Judging by who is labeled an SJW, I'm one, and mentioning the existence of trans people in a context where their existence is relevant is sufficient to be labeled an SJW.

As for judging a programming language in three seconds...that's a bad analysis of the situation. I left Nim in part because Araq was, shall we say, less than friendly. That wasn't the only reason, but it was a contributing factor. A poor impression of the community might not suffice to drive anyone away, but it can be a factor that, combined with poor documentation and poor library support, causes someone to leave.