I just stumbled across an 18-year old essay, by an economist and one-time tech entrepreneur written during the dot.com boom, about open source and its properties, and this paragraph particularly reminded me of D, especially the bit about the mailing list which we're anachronistically still using:

"With 'open source' software, the only user with any influence is a user with the 'right stuff' to go into the code and enhance the software. As an 'open source' developer, you never have to attend meetings with corporate suits. Instead, your only communication is with an elite mailing list of co-developers. You don’t have to worry about having focus groups test the usability of your software. Your users are gear-heads who think that escape sequences constitute an intuitive interface. You don’t have to worry about a marketing department spoiling the elegance of your design by promising features that you did not anticipate."

Read the whole thing, it's worth it:

http://arnoldkling.com/~arnoldsk/aimst2/aimst205.html

Some of his predictions in the essay are wrong, but only because he expected end users to run web servers one day or didn't anticipate browsers becoming part of the OS bundle: his fundamental reasoning is mostly correct.

Of course, I agree with his conclusion that open source will always have to coexist with proprietary source, especially given that I have proposed a way to mix the two:

http://forum.dlang.org/thread/okuzksqzczprvuklpzaw@forum.dlang.org

Note that the above quote is not necessarily meant as damning the D process, as there are real advantages to not having to deal with the marketing department.  But there are also disadvantages, ie there are both pros and cons.  The D core team has to realize that they're operating in a bubble with their open source process.

The only way that D devs know that the setup process is not working well is when some noob opens a forum thread to complain:

http://forum.dlang.org/thread/fomwalvifzprjneswrcv@forum.dlang.org

I haven't used Windows or any other desktop device/OS in years, so I wouldn't know what problems they're having.  The usual math in these situations is that 10-20 users simply drop the tech and run away for the one who complains.

By the reasoning in the essay, I don't expect this to be solved for free: the solution is for the devs behind the IDEs, Visual Studio, DlangIDE, etc., to charge money for a streamlined process. Why hasn't this happened yet?

There are such commercial support options for every other major OSS language, someone will have to do this for D at some point for it to take the next step.

On Thursday, 12 October 2017 at 07:54:19 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>
> By the reasoning in the essay, I don't expect this to be solved for free: the solution is for the devs behind the IDEs, Visual Studio, DlangIDE, etc., to charge money for a streamlined process. Why hasn't this happened yet?
>
> There are such commercial support options for every other major OSS language, someone will have to do this for D at some point for it to take the next step.

Something like Anaconda could serve as a business model. Free basic download, but then enterprise-level support and offerings for additional money.

It doesn't even need to be offered as a profit-making entity at first. Charge enough to cover slightly more than costs (programmer time, etc.) and donate the rest to the D foundation.

On Thursday, 12 October 2017 at 11:32:55 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> On Thursday, 12 October 2017 at 07:54:19 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>
>> By the reasoning in the essay, I don't expect this to be solved for free: the solution is for the devs behind the IDEs, Visual Studio, DlangIDE, etc., to charge money for a streamlined process. Why hasn't this happened yet?
>>
>> There are such commercial support options for every other major OSS language, someone will have to do this for D at some point for it to take the next step.
>
> Something like Anaconda could serve as a business model. Free basic download, but then enterprise-level support and offerings for additional money.
>
> It doesn't even need to be offered as a profit-making entity at first. Charge enough to cover slightly more than costs (programmer time, etc.) and donate the rest to the D foundation.

+1

D is a very productive programming language for high performance developments.

It already has its place in some successful companies.

And asking money for special customer support (training, etc) is normal.

For instance, that would not harm the D community to have more money involved in improving and extending D's standard library towards nowadays' most common developer needs (GUI, networking, db access, etc).