On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 06:29:01PM +0000, bachmeier via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 18:22:04 UTC, Nicholas Wilson 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.
> > 
> > You mean D1? I hope we're not there already with D2!
> 
> I was referring to the D1 -> D2 transition. It has been claimed by Walter that it nearly killed the language so he doesn't want D2 -> D3.

Yes, that's been Walter & Andrei's motto for the last X number of years now.  Thing is, though, that at *some* point you just have to move on. The only unchanging language is a dead one; this applies both in natural language and programming languages.

That's why it was so refreshing to hear Andrei propose std.v2 recently. That's a good first step from the past few years' worth of "we dare not fix X because it might break code".  I hope there will eventually be a D3.  And a D4.


T

-- 
Живёшь только однажды.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 14:24:05 UTC, Chris wrote:
> Crystal and Nim also have C interop and afaik support Android
> and iOS (correct me if I'm wrong) and JS. C interop was one of
> the features that turned me onto D.

You're wrong. Android and iOS are both incredibly developer-hostile
platforms. There's almost nothing that supports development on
them, and a lot of what support exists is hackish and limited or
massively inconvenient vs. what you get with official development
tools.

It's not a case of "bindings vs. *real* libraries". It's "go write
your GUI with raw X11 networking instead of using any library --
and and BTW we're moving to Wayland and your X11 stuff will stop
working one day for important security reasons."

Some 'support' is even a lie. There's a StackOverflow answer that
earnestly suggested Clojure for Android development--linking to a
page that described Clojure apps as requiring several seconds just
to launch on Android. Scala was also promoted for Android, and
don't you mind that dalvik limitations and Scala class-spam mean
that your app will one day abruptly no longer work for extremely
hard to deal with reasons.

I once built an Android app with some Mercury in it, compiling to
Java. In the same way you can probably put Nim on Android by
compiling to JS and using some JS tool chains. You can also write a
Java launcher that manages UI, with other program logic via a
shared library or with IPC to a packaged CLI executable that's
running in the background. That gives you just about any language
with an ARM toolchain or C transpiling. If you don't care about
massive inconvenience vs. using the intended development kits.

I've stopped caring about mobile, but in Termux on a Android tablet
right here, I have ldc2 installed with apt, and can compile D code
on the go. For a while you could even build .apks directly on a
device, and install them locally, with http://www.spartacusrex.com/terminalide.htm
That made for some quick turn-around and I enjoyed working with it
while it lasted. It still wasn't as good as PalmOS development.

On Fri, 2019-04-12 at 17:50 +0000, Nicholas Wilson via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
[…]
> I'm at ACCU ATM and most of the people I've talked to about have heard of it,

A few ACCU attenders are even using D. But not many. If D claims to be a C++ replacement then ACCU conferences really should have a D track every year as justification of that claim. This year Rust has a strong showing as does Kotlin and Kotlin/Native. Go is not really represented.

[…]

-- 
Russel.
===========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk

On Fri, 2019-04-12 at 18:05 +0000, JN via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> […]
> This is an unfair comparison. Kotlin is piggybacking on JVM and
> Java. First few versions of Kotlin were basically Java with
> Project Lombok annotations added as language features rather than
> awkward compilation stage hack. Only later did it start to emerge
> as a new language with its own paradigms.

Please do not forget that a large number of features of Kotlin, even early versions, stem from things that were started in Groovy.

-- 
Russel.
===========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk

On 4/12/2019 12:35 AM, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
> I have been using D since around 2012 or 2013, instantly fell in love, use to post on the forms a lot under the name Tofu Ninja. I was convinced D was the future but since then I have become disheartened. 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 put on my resume that I like D and every interview I get asked about it, having to explain what D even is because they have never heard of it. I have never seen a job posting listing D. Never see any projects pop up on /r/programming using D. It feels like to the rest of the programming universe, D doesn't even exist. Sometimes I see threads on reddit like "what's your favorite programming language" and I always look for D but never find it.

It's up to all of us whenver we see a thread like that, to respond appropriately. Don't wait for someone else to.

For example, whenever there's a post about D on reddit, someone from Rust, usually Steve Blatnick, pops up and starts talking about Rust.

I think the problem with D is that it started getting a mass adoption and this requires a bigger management, for example: regular user polls, prioritization, concentration of efforts, friendly contribution guides, time limits on issue resolutions, regular health stats, coordination with sponsors, maybe even a podcast especially for what would be a lightning for introducing libraries and new features... etc. D is no longer a niche language and this is a problem.

On 12.04.19 20:13, Nierjerson wrote:
> ... I said that if you only support the language features that you use then it is selfishness. [...]
> 

And I have in fact added some compiler features that I'll most likely never use myself. But I won't go ahead and sink >1k hours into a spare time project (e.g. IDE) that I don't primarily care for. If that's selfish, then everyone is selfish. If everyone works on something that is missing and they care about enough, then everything that someone cares about enough will eventually get worked on. Having people who don't care about certain things work on them while they have other things to do is just bad resource allocation. Furthermore, you need to have a strange notion of "selfishness" to think that sharing your work is selfish just because you happened to work on something that benefits yourself in addition to others.

> ...
>> It's fine, not great, but better than would-be competitors for my current use cases.
> 
> My point above. For YOU. You care less about other users and their use cases. D is fine for you, so why do you want to keep it bad for others 

That's a loaded question, and it is bullshit.

> rather than help it work for them too? That is very selfish.
> ...

And demanding that others work on your problems for free is not?

> 
>>
>>> then why would you not want it to be more popular?
>>
>> When everything else is the same, having more users is a liability.
> 
> True, but one can make such blanket statements about everything. It's nonsensical in practice because nothing can ever be the same. The amount of manhours that are invested in D is proportional to the "popularity". By forcing everything else the same you remove that condition and so it then becomes pointless.
> 
> This isn't a business selling things

You mean like, demanding money to compensate for invested time and resources spent on someone else's problems? How selfish.

> ... There isn't a trade off here with D's community.

Well, clearly you are trying to tell someone to do something differently. It's unlikely to have no cost. (Otherwise you could just do it yourself instead of wasting time writing long forum posts, hoping that other people will do as you say.)

> The larger the community the more investment those people put in to D and that helps D as a language and compiler grow and that helps everyone that uses it and draws in more people who invest more time.
> ...

There can also be more users without there being more people working on open-source projects. It seems that the people who complain about D in the forums in the fashion you are doing are rarely active contributors.

> 
>> 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.
> 
> Popularity automatically does not cause problems. It is the state of the human race that causes the problems. If the logic is "We don't want D popular because it will cause problems in the forums" then D is shooting itself in the head.

That is literally the opposite of the statement I made, but fine.

> There are ways to alleviate such problems so one doesn't have to sacrifice one for the other.
> ...

Even if so, you will sacrifice some third thing.

On 4/12/2019 5:25 PM, Suleyman wrote:
> I think the problem with D is that it started getting a mass adoption and this requires a bigger management, for example: regular user polls, prioritization, concentration of efforts, friendly contribution guides, time limits on issue resolutions, regular health stats, coordination with sponsors, maybe even a podcast especially for what would be a lightning for introducing libraries and new features... etc. D is no longer a niche language and this is a problem.

Something you can do to help is as I said - when you see other languages mentioned, mention D. It helps a lot more than you might think.

On Saturday, 13 April 2019 at 03:46:51 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 4/12/2019 5:25 PM, Suleyman wrote:
>> I think the problem with D is that it started getting a mass adoption and this requires a bigger management, for example: regular user polls, prioritization, concentration of efforts, friendly contribution guides, time limits on issue resolutions, regular health stats, coordination with sponsors, maybe even a podcast especially for what would be a lightning for introducing libraries and new features... etc. D is no longer a niche language and this is a problem.
>
> Something you can do to help is as I said - when you see other languages mentioned, mention D. It helps a lot more than you might think.

great, you are avoiding to talk about the problems again.
how about:
The sole reason that D has failed is the management of D has failed... and, of course, they will never accept that truth. They believe their methods are correct and working and the failure is not due to them. D is actually an old language and there are many new languages popping up like weeds... eventually D will not be so shiny and more and it will just become another weed. That is already happening actually.  As many languages modify their designs to include what was great about D, D becomes less attractive.

or

Now there is talk of re-writing D, after the umpteenth half baked feature was introduced. We'll see, we'll see. IMO, the trouble really started when the D Foundation was set up. Instead of streamlining and stabilizing D, the whole thing turned into a closed shop with a "Hey, we are the lads" kinda attitude, and any CS theory or fashion of the day would finally be half baked into the language without a second thought. Without paying attention to users and the answer to complaints would be "we want to turn D into a functional style memory safe [...] language, that's why we had to introduce RefFancy, so eff your code!", except it still isn't and RefFancy has to be removed or replaced! Who would have guessed it would be at loggerheads with FancyRange!?

or

And apart from all the fancy feature madness, there's this arrogant attitude towards users. To avoid criticism my words were twisted in such an obvious and blatant way that it was just ridiculous. And what's really funny is that mistakes made by the leadership, and the leadership alone, are now being socialized as in "the community this, the community that, and this has to change!". Ah, give me a break.

or

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.

or

On one point I agree: It's time to get rid of all the wrong decisions done in the past, and simplify the language, founding it over the strong points learned from D2.
It's time for D3.

or

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

or ....

On Saturday, 13 April 2019 at 03:46:51 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>
> Something you can do to help is as I said - when you see other languages mentioned, mention D. It helps a lot more than you might think.

Yeah that would help but I don't see D as merely a project anymore I see D as an organization although a small one but a big community and from a business standpoint keeping your clients happy is more important than getting new clients even though a product maybe great but a company wouldn't survive on that alone.