On 18.06.2017 13:59, bachmeier wrote:
> 
> Posts like this have to be deleted from the website and users that post such things need to be banned.

Then maybe don't quote the offending post next time.

On Sunday, 18 June 2017 at 08:40:22 UTC, Mike B Johnson wrote:
> Cool. Since we are friends now, I have some advice for you: I suggest that if you want anyone to take you seriously, I suggest you check your mediocrity mentality at the door.
>
> See how that works?!?! Probably not. I suggest you get with the program and stop assuming it's ok to waste peoples time, including your own. The world would be a better place if people like you stopped playing your little games and grow up. Then people like me wouldn't have to constantly put you in your place.

Mike, if people do not want to listen, simply accept that... Going on a yelling tirade solves nothing.

I already concluded from this "discussion" that there is no point trying to point out issues with D. Maybe too many people in the past pointed out the same stuff and they are tired of it.

Whatever the issue is, simply move on. If they do not want to attract new people or want to make it more easy, who are we to talk about it ( as the same new people ).

There are good people in the D community but in some responses you get the attitude like "how do you not know something so simple". And i am not talking about this topic. There are responses that borderline "how stupid are you". Maybe not in those words but you can read it clearly.

Maybe because i got some of those responses that i also felt more "inflammatory" in this topic by generalizing. But reading comments like:

>Perhaps _this_ is the right packaging for D right now, to keep away the kinds of casual users who would not be suited for D.

It angers the hell out of me when people look down on other developers because they do not have the right background or are somehow considered less trying to deal with inadequacies in the D ecosystem.

I am not targeting any person here but there are people here with good intentions and people who to not realize how there responses look down on people. Some do not understand that not everybody has 10+ years in developing C/C++ programs and knows every terminology and understands every aspect of the memory management and the ins and out.

But there is no point fighting this attitude. Just use D for what you need it or move to a different language. I am at this moment contemplating moving my code base to different language for this same reason.

My impression of D:

* The forums is a mixed bag of good intention people who give you the answer you need. Some people who look down for asking a stupid question. Some people who take criticism about D such a personal level. And people who are simply rude, maybe there have good intention but have short fuse ( i wonder who that is :) ).

* Git: I found the people who managed the code summations to D GIT way more helpful and frankly very pleasant. I learned a lot in a short amount of time despite being a total noob at this.

Frankly, sometimes i wish i NEVER discovered the forums because seeing some of the discussions and reading the past discussions, it feels like a darn pool of evil. Good, bad and just ugly. It frankly demotivates...

And it has now **highly** opinionated my attitude about D, to the point that makes me wonder. As a potential employer:

If i hire people with no D knowledge and they need to learn D. They go to these forums and get sucked into this.

What about easy of learning, issues they may run into. It means time i need to spend teaching new employees to avoid some of the issues mentioned here ( and a lot of past topics that i found ). I do not understand because on other language forums the discussions are more civilized, there seem to be less looking down on people. Maybe i use the Rust argument a bit too much but to be good at Rust a good background is extreme helpful and yet, i do not notice the same attitude with people ask stupid questions or are not happy about something. I really, REALLY think that some people have been living so long in a bubble, that they do not understand how person some of there responses are and how it affects future posting from new members.

There are a lot of other things... but it will sidetrack things even more. Its already a wall of text by now.

But it really comes down in its most simple form: "Language good, library can use some work but useful, standard documentation disaster ( until you discover the library doc ), community mixed bag, 3th party plugins again mixed bag ( some good, some bad, some not maintained ), language future not 100% sure about where it will end up".

And that is my personal and honest opinion...

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And please, do not quote my text piece by piece, ripping me a new one for being inflammatory or whatever. Its how I from MY perceptive see things. Just as you, the person reading this will have there own opinion.

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As for me, i will be looking a bit more into other languages and there communities. For a hobby project D is perfectly fine but as a future employer my standard is much more ridge. I want to hire people first with lower experience ( cheaper ) and let them learn on the job. And well ... lets say that my impression has been a mixed experience so far. Especially if this means exposing people with maybe scripting language experience to a compile language like D.

Maybe its time to tidy the ship because first impression count for a lot.

I see nothing that i can add to this. I only wanted to respond because the topic is getting way too heated and i hope this turns it into a different direction with ALL parties looking back a bit at what is being written.

/end wall of text. Now excuse me will i put time into different and more productive things.

On Friday, 16 June 2017 at 03:53:18 UTC, Mike B Johnson wrote:
> Just try getting D installed on all 3 major systems for DMD, LDC, GDC, with an IDE, some utilities, possibly arm support(even though it's new and expected to have some issues), etc. The issues really start popping up when you are trying to use x86 + x64. Library issues that result in strange error messages instead of "This compiler is not compatible with the phobos v2.4324".

Might be worth considering something like the Android SDK installer. It looked like this:

http://cache.filehippo.com/img/ex/4515__android_sdk_1_8_5_15.png

Essentially it was a cross-platform package manager GUI, which allowed installing platform support for various platform versions side-by-side, as well as additional utilities and dependencies. It also exposed its functionality via command-line tools and IDE integrations. This translates fairly well to the D ecosystem, and could serve as a decent work-around for Windows' lack of native package management.

We have some of the pieces as separate tools (Digger, DVM, the dlang.org/install.sh script, the Windows' installer's Visual Studio detection/integration), could be nice tying them together into a palatable GUI. Digger has a rudimentary one, which probably could be wrapped into a native-like app using Electron, but still lacking features such as managing GDC/LDC.

On Sunday, 18 June 2017 at 14:53:57 UTC, Wulfklaue wrote:
> But it really comes down in its most simple form: "Language good, library can use some work but useful, standard documentation disaster ( until you discover the library doc ),

some people keep saying that. and i dont understand them. i think the documentation of the d language is good. i could learn the whole language with just looking at http://dlang.org/spec/spec.html
It contains many examples and is easy to read. Someone exclusively coming from the scripting-world  might have issues though, i am not sure

On Sunday, 18 June 2017 at 11:59:34 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> As D continues to grow, there will be messages like this posted more frequently. Imagine that you work at a large company and are considering adopting D so you decide to check out the forum.
>
> Posts like this have to be deleted from the website and users that post such things need to be banned. Like it or not, this is marketing.

I strongly disagree about deletion and banning.  The moment you start removing dissenting opinions, you move towards a bubble where you get isolated from the world.  These people are detailing real frustrations that they had, albeit in a shrill manner, feedback that doesn't hurt.

As for their posts affecting corporate perception, better they see the truth now and know what they're getting into, rather than the companies coming in here and ranting later, only to get their posts deleted too! :D

On Sunday, 18 June 2017 at 14:53:57 UTC, Wulfklaue wrote:
>>Perhaps _this_ is the right packaging for D right now, to keep away the kinds of casual users who would not be suited for D.
>
> It angers the hell out of me when people look down on other developers because they do not have the right background or are somehow considered less trying to deal with inadequacies in the D ecosystem.

You left out the bit after that where I noted that D is a sprawling, lower-level language, and that I had no strong opinion on that guess about this being the right packaging for D right now.  The fact is that people who deal with languages like D are usually fine with more complex setups and require less hand-holding.  New languages like Rust, Go, and Swift are upping the AoT-compiled language game and making things better, but all are still prone to the issues you raise.

What I was saying is that if you made D _really easy_ to install, as easy as installing a scripting language in a linux distro except on every OS, it would be really easy for them to get going, but not easier to actually grasp a much more complex language.  It is a basic concept of distribution that you put your product where and how you can get the types of users you want, ie you would not try and sell a buzzsaw or backhoe in the corner grocery store.  You can call that "looking down," I call it a fact.

Also, a lot of this polish is missing because D is an OSS project that doesn't have corporate involvement driving it.  No pure OSS project without heavy corporate involvement has ever gotten everywhere, you will find corporate hands all over everything from the linux kernel to gcc to Python.  D has some, but not that much yet.  It is amazing how far it has gotten without it.

Finally, my point was that since D is not at the stage where it has corporate support to polish it up to the sheen you want, perhaps it's better to keep away the kind of users who want that level of integration.  That's not to say they're "less," but that D is not ready for them yet.

We all hope D gets there someday, but maybe it's not yet ready to make that leap.

On 6/18/17 11:04 PM, Joakim wrote:
> I strongly disagree about deletion and banning.  The moment you start removing dissenting opinions, you move towards a bubble where you get isolated from the world.
Foul or abusive language has nothing to do with dissenting. It's really simple - using unprofessional language that could get you fired from a workplace is not accepted here. Thanks. -- Andrei

On Sunday, 18 June 2017 at 20:04:48 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Sunday, 18 June 2017 at 11:59:34 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>> As D continues to grow, there will be messages like this posted more frequently. Imagine that you work at a large company and are considering adopting D so you decide to check out the forum.
>>
>> Posts like this have to be deleted from the website and users that post such things need to be banned. Like it or not, this is marketing.
>
> I strongly disagree about deletion and banning.  The moment you start removing dissenting opinions, you move towards a bubble where you get isolated from the world.  These people are detailing real frustrations that they had, albeit in a shrill manner, feedback that doesn't hurt.
>
> As for their posts affecting corporate perception, better they see the truth now and know what they're getting into, rather than the companies coming in here and ranting later, only to get their posts deleted too! :D

Yes - from my perspective, the way you know something is true is if you can recognise it as potentially such and expose it to critique and there hasn't been a _good_ argument against it.  It's certainly true that the more corporate types will be put off by the directness and passion of discussions here, but I really don't think they are likely to be earlier adopters of D.  The people who will be early adopters are discerning principals who have the ability to make decisions personally and bear the consequences rather than managerial agent types operating in a world where social perception dominates.  The managerial types will come later - that's the price of success that it draws a different kind of person.  From a hiring perspective, it's a positive thing that very few people are involved with D primarily for careerist reasons - even though I can think of quite a few people for whom it's turning out to be pretty good indeed, and where taking a more conventional route would not have had this payoff over time.

This being said, there is only one problem which is that anyone can say anything and until you know who is insightful then it's not in the beginning obvious.  Some people here (not many) for example that are highly intelligent are constantly criticising the direction of the language - but I'm really not sure they do much in D at all - they just like hanging out here and arguing: for them it is like sports.

So I think people should earn the right to be listened to and who they are and what they have contributed sets the context for how one should understand a passionate critique, even rant.  If Manu, for example, (I am thinking of a while back) expresses frustration and in very specific terms about infelicities then that's something we should take seriously because it's evident that he cares about the language and community and would just like to remove such infelicities because they get in the way of it being adopted by colleagues and associates.  We might not be able to change much in the short term, but such a thing one should take seriously.

As Walter said you should listen to your current best customers not the people who give you friendly 'free advice' when they do not actually have skin in the game.  A community isn't a democracy - you listen to people who have shown they know what they are talking about, and the amount of noise people make is not very related to how much insightful they have to say.

On Sunday, 18 June 2017 at 20:04:48 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> I strongly disagree about deletion and banning.  The moment you start removing dissenting opinions, you move towards a bubble where you get isolated from the world.  These people are detailing real frustrations that they had, albeit in a shrill manner, feedback that doesn't hurt.
>
> As for their posts affecting corporate perception, better they see the truth now and know what they're getting into, rather than the companies coming in here and ranting later, only to get their posts deleted too! :D

Couldn't have said it better.

Though I just filed [Add some Hackernews-like ranking and upvoting](https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/issues/84) because relevance and not wasting people's time matters.

> Finally, my point was that since D is not at the stage where it has corporate support to polish it up to the sheen you want, perhaps it's better to keep away the kind of users who want that level of integration.  That's not to say they're "less," but that D is not ready for them yet.
>
> We all hope D gets there someday, but maybe it's not yet ready to make that leap.

You have quite a good point there, that said the Windows experience is fairly bad, no point about it. That's mostly because VisualStudio integration is required, be it for their linker and libc only, and that isn't too well done.

On Sunday, 18 June 2017 at 15:47:34 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Friday, 16 June 2017 at 03:53:18 UTC, Mike B Johnson wrote:
>> Just try getting D installed on all 3 major systems for DMD, LDC, GDC, with an IDE, some utilities, possibly arm support(even though it's new and expected to have some issues), etc. The issues really start popping up when you are trying to use x86 + x64. Library issues that result in strange error messages instead of "This compiler is not compatible with the phobos v2.4324".
>
> Might be worth considering something like the Android SDK installer. It looked like this:
>
> http://cache.filehippo.com/img/ex/4515__android_sdk_1_8_5_15.png
>
> Essentially it was a cross-platform package manager GUI, which allowed installing platform support for various platform versions side-by-side, as well as additional utilities and dependencies. It also exposed its functionality via command-line tools and IDE integrations. This translates fairly well to the D ecosystem, and could serve as a decent work-around for Windows' lack of native package management.
>
> We have some of the pieces as separate tools (Digger, DVM, the dlang.org/install.sh script, the Windows' installer's Visual Studio detection/integration), could be nice tying them together into a palatable GUI. Digger has a rudimentary one, which probably could be wrapped into a native-like app using Electron, but still lacking features such as managing GDC/LDC.


Digger is great, as is the Windows installer, and I appreciate the work that has gone into them.

Sadly though in the current year we have been ruined by everything being made easy for us - personally I have no problem taking things apart to get to the bottom of a problem when it doesn't work, but in the business world that is not universally true, alas. So I think what lets us down sometimes is tiny little things that maybe aren't complicated to fix, but are maybe a bit specific.  For example it's not so easy to build 64 bit dmd on Windows from the command line (and I don't understand why we don't distribute a binary).  Or the installer somehow doesn't seem to work with VS 2015 and I haven't even had the time to figure out what the problem is because it's not on my machine and I don't develop much on Windows at all myself.

Having a tsar of ergonomics or user experience might be something valuable.  Not really a tsar, but just someone to co-ordinate improvement of those little frictions that one doesn't even notice after using D for a while, but that are a big impediment to a newcomer.  I mean you could sit with someone new to the language and see what they struggle with, or do it remotely and chat every week.  You would learn a lot that way.  It doesn't need to be an expensive resource - an intern could do that.

The culture is shaped a bit by C/C++ world, but actually I disagree with Joakim that D is a low-level language.  I don't really use it that way myself, and others before me - including Liran at Weka (who is pretty low-level when he needs to be) - have observed that D has qualities of a compiled Python.  And people who use it like the latter are a bit accustomed to comfort, and so it's a bit of a shock when for exaple someone comes from C# or Python on Windows and wants to install zeromq and realises (or worse, doesn't) they have to build the C library themselves on Windows when they never even heard of cmake before.  This was a real example, and the person grumbled that D was a lousy language for that reason...  It's also true that an excessive love of comfort is a civilisation-killer, and I think that's one of the strengths of the community - that people who persist are those who aren't put off by things being a bit difficult in the beginning - but perhaps its a matter of balance, and one could think about how to make the experience a bit easier.  (Yes, I realise that even today, Windows native code library management is a problem - I just use that as an example).

On Sunday, 18 June 2017 at 21:01:10 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
> On Sunday, 18 June 2017 at 20:04:48 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> I strongly disagree about deletion and banning.  The moment you start removing dissenting opinions, you move towards a bubble where you get isolated from the world.  These people are detailing real frustrations that they had, albeit in a shrill manner, feedback that doesn't hurt.
>>
>> As for their posts affecting corporate perception, better they see the truth now and know what they're getting into, rather than the companies coming in here and ranting later, only to get their posts deleted too! :D
>
> Couldn't have said it better.
>
> Though I just filed [Add some Hackernews-like ranking and upvoting](https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/issues/84) because relevance and not wasting people's time matters.
>
>> Finally, my point was that since D is not at the stage where it has corporate support to polish it up to the sheen you want, perhaps it's better to keep away the kind of users who want that level of integration.  That's not to say they're "less," but that D is not ready for them yet.
>>
>> We all hope D gets there someday, but maybe it's not yet ready to make that leap.
>
> You have quite a good point there, that said the Windows experience is fairly bad, no point about it. That's mostly because VisualStudio integration is required, be it for their linker and libc only, and that isn't too well done.

Is it possible to use lld on Windows?  I never tried it myself.
https://lld.llvm.org/