On Tuesday, 9 January 2024 at 19:32:10 UTC, GrimMaple wrote:
> On Tuesday, 9 January 2024 at 15:01:28 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> […] More importantly, this pointless bantering is used
> as an escape goat to shut down changes that DLF doesn't want/like, yet DLF itself never bothers with breakage if it implements some kewl new feature that nobody asked for.

There is the vision document from Mike Parker (https://github.com/dlang/vision-document)

I think it’s noble attempt and could be starting point for improvements. But I’m interested in your opinion.

Where you involved somehow?
Do you see any of your concerns somehow addressed?

On 1/8/2024 11:40 PM, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
> So you would get ``pr\efix`` as the string value. As the standard rules of double quoted strings would apply in that subset of the i-string.

The standard rules of double quoted strings produce the error message:

Error: undefined escape sequence \e

On 1/8/2024 11:42 PM, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
> On 09/01/2024 8:40 PM, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
>> Is equivalent to:
>>
>> "pr\efix"
> 
> If you use a markdown viewer (like myself) this is probably rendering out to be one backslash.
> 
> It is meant to be two, as you need to escape the backslash to get into the value rather than trying to escape the e.

Oh, ok. That explains it.

On Tuesday, 9 January 2024 at 18:23:47 UTC, Abdulhaq wrote:
> * D is Walter's baby and his life work. As other people come and go, as they are wont do with any project such as D, he knows he will be left holding the baby and maintaining it.

There was a similar story with Vim. Bram Moolinear was a BDFL and was rather defensive in regards to the project direction. So eventually Vim was forked and Neovim happened. Not only it enjoys great popularity now, but it was a great catalyst for Vim develpment, which was stangnating at that time.

On 1/9/2024 9:42 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>  From a technical
> standpoint, D has no parallels that I know of -- it comes very close to
> my ideal of what a programming language should be.  But the way it's
> managed leaves a lot to be desired.  It would be a pity for this
> beautiful language to languish when under a different style of
> management it could be flourishing and taking over the world.


Thank you for the kind compliments about D. Perhaps one reason it is such a nice language is because I say "no" to most enhancements? D would have version algebra and macros if it was a committee. Some features are great ideas, until you've used them for 10 years, and come to the realization that they aren't so good of an idea.

Aesthetic appeal is a big deal. D has got to look good on the screen, because after all, we spend most "programming" time just staring at the code. I remember once attending a C++ conference where the presenter had slides of his innovative ideas, and I had the thought that there was no way to format that or rewrite it so it looked good. I've had that experience many times with C++.

For example, one of the Tango features I rejected was creating a clone of C++'s iostreams. I knew by then that iostreams was a great idea, but it just looked awful on the screen (and had some other fundamental problems). The modern consensus is that iostreams was a misuse of operator overloading.

D also restricts operator overloading to discourage using it as a DSL (though Tango still managed to use it for I/O).

I could go on with that, but that's enough for the moment.

The end goal for me with D is that it will no longer need me.

As for Phobos, I am not involved with it directly. There has been a sequence of people in charge of it, but that hasn't worked out too well. But there is a core team of 35 people (though some are inactive) that controls what goes into it:

https://github.com/orgs/dlang/teams/team-phobos

They have the authority to decide what goes in Phobos or not. I'm open to nominations to that team.

Anybody can bring attention on the n.g. to any PR that is being overlooked.

On 1/9/2024 12:45 AM, whitebyte wrote:
> It's fascinating that Walter did not relate to this at all

A great strength of D is that it is deliberately constructed so that anyone can fork it at any time for any reason. I'm really pleased that we were finally able to get the back end Boost licensed, too. That means the D compiler has the least restrictive license in the world!

I did not dive into this as I thought it reasonable for people to make up their own minds without myself muddying the waters.

On Tuesday, 9 January 2024 at 20:02:40 UTC, BlueBeach wrote:
> There is the vision document from Mike Parker (https://github.com/dlang/vision-document)
>
> I think it’s noble attempt and could be starting point for improvements. But I’m interested in your opinion.
>
> Where you involved somehow?
> Do you see any of your concerns somehow addressed?

I think I accidentlly kick-started that by one of my rants on the discord. I definitely wasn't the cause, but maybe just the final straw.

It is a good read, however, 2 years passed and you see literally 0 development. Nothing is improved in reality. It's all just talk, no action. I had my scepticism, but now I'm 95% sure that none of that is going to be implemented; it's just gonna rot as a historical artifact on the internet.

On Tue, Jan 09, 2024 at 01:11:39PM -0800, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 1/9/2024 9:42 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > From a technical standpoint, D has no parallels that I know of -- it comes very close to my ideal of what a programming language should be.  But the way it's managed leaves a lot to be desired.  It would be a pity for this beautiful language to languish when under a different style of management it could be flourishing and taking over the world.
> 
> Thank you for the kind compliments about D. Perhaps one reason it is such a nice language is because I say "no" to most enhancements? D would have version algebra and macros if it was a committee. Some features are great ideas, until you've used them for 10 years, and come to the realization that they aren't so good of an idea.
> 
> Aesthetic appeal is a big deal. D has got to look good on the screen, because after all, we spend most "programming" time just staring at the code. I remember once attending a C++ conference where the presenter had slides of his innovative ideas, and I had the thought that there was no way to format that or rewrite it so it looked good. I've had that experience many times with C++.

It's C++, aesthetic appeal isn't even on the list. :-D


[...]
> The end goal for me with D is that it will no longer need me.

Wonderful!

The way it's going right now, however, appears to be in the complete opposite direction.


> As for Phobos, I am not involved with it directly. There has been a sequence of people in charge of it, but that hasn't worked out too well. But there is a core team of 35 people (though some are inactive) that controls what goes into it:
> 
> https://github.com/orgs/dlang/teams/team-phobos
> 
> They have the authority to decide what goes in Phobos or not. I'm open to nominations to that team.

I'm on that list. ;-)  But I haven't contributed for a long while now. Currently there isn't much incentive for me to do so.  The barrier of entry is too high, both for contributor and reviewer -- even for a D veteran like me, if I can say so myself.  The requirements are disproportionate for small changes, needless to say for big changes. And there are a lot of unstated, unwritten expectations.  I don't have the energy / patience to second guess what's acceptable and what's not, when I could be writing code for my own projects instead.


> Anybody can bring attention on the n.g. to any PR that is being overlooked.

And they're unlikely to get any better response.


All of this could be justifiable. There may be solid technical reasons behind it all.  But the message that would-be contributors are getting is unfortunately not inviting more of them to join in.  So this situation persists.  It is what it is.


T

-- 
Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

On 1/9/2024 10:23 AM, Abdulhaq wrote:
> * Languages such as D need a BDFL who spends more time managing and orchestrating developments than cutting their own code.

The trouble is there are some coding problems that only I can resolve. For example, nobody else is crazy enough to have embedded a C compiler into D. Heck, I thought it was a crazy idea for a couple decades.

Would anyone else have implemented an ownership/borrowing system for D? It exists as a prototype in the compiler now, though it's been fallow for a bit as too many other things are happening. I know its design is controversial (Timon doesn't like it at all!), and it hasn't yet proven itself.

Many bugzilla issues get forwarded to me because nobody else seems to want to or are able to fix them.

I've been slowly working on restructuring the front end so it is more understandable and tractable.

I'm also very impressed with how far along Razvan and Dennis have come in being able to deal with difficult compiler problems.