Justin C Calvarese wrote:
> 
> It's pretty simple, but it should be powerful enough.
> 
> I just changed the template for the whole site to the template that I had been trying out with the DocComments pages.
> 
> http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?FrontPage
> 
> Does the new template look any better? I can change it back if you don't think it's an improvement.
> 
> We can make further changes as well. The template system seems to be pretty flexible. I think my problem is a lack of imagination.
> 

I'm more concerned with content than with presentation, nonetheless the new template looks better and is welcome.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D

Kyle Furlong wrote:

> Aside: It must be a team. DWT is stagnant because Shawn doesnt have time, and no one else understands the code well enough to continue.

GDC suffers from a similar fate, since David Friedman has been busy.
And I won't even think about what would happen to D, without Walter...

--anders

Kyle Furlong wrote:
> I'm becoming more and more convinced that D needs a polished presence. How did Java succeed? Marketing. Plain and simple, the first revisions sucked, but got evangelized extremely effectively. How much better, since we have a quality compiler, to market it.
>
100% Agreement.

> While I appreciate this feeling, this mode of operation will only gain us a certain base of users, i.e. hobbyists and one man operations who can afford to invest in a new language on just its merits. Everyone else (read, the majority of the IT world) cannot form decisions only on the merits of a compiler. Organizations need reassurances of a polished presence. This means documentation, support, packaging, and marketing.

What D *really* needs is unification among the Community, D is already very powerful but in this day and age it is just arcane not to have a decent *RAD GUI IDE* to compliment the language, as well as a useful framework library, look at Net and Java, there is nothing fundamentally new or great that stands out in these languages, they are themselves a branch off of C, but they do have excellent libraries and a plethora of RAD GUI IDE's to make them more attractive to developers.

When I was at college we were only allowed to use a text editor, make files and command line to program and were considered whingers if we said otherwise, today a good RAD GUI IDE is considered the norm in places of education, and definitely in the work place, no company is going to seriously consider D while it lacks a decent GUI library and a half decent IDE, Poseidon looks promising but is using what appears to be a now defunct DWT for its GUI framework.

> To this end, I propose the formation of an organization/committee, headed by Walter, to guide the process of creating this polished presence.
>
Good idea, but why not head it up yourself?
Let Walter concentrate on what he does best, the more time Walter is detracted
from D = Less progress in making D even better.

> Some things which this committee should consider are:
>
> 1. Unified std library which is 100% covered and stable.
*A unified D Community*

> 2. Formation of a GUI /team/ to pick and/or develop further a cross platform solution.
>
Yes this is a good idea

> Aside: It must be a team. DWT is stagnant because Shawn doesnt have time, and no one else understands the code well enough to continue.
>
100% Agree *Team* is the key word here many hands make light work, many brains make for many ideas which makes for better programs, take the best of everything and create perfection.

> 3. Choice of a new mascot/revamp of D-man. Also consider a new name.
>
I kind of like D Man he looks kind of retro :)

I am all for contributing in a team effort, but feel my efforts would be ineffective channelling my energies into half finished one man efforts, and please do not take that comment personally, but to create something of the magnitude that is required to really lift D head and shoulders above the rest requires more than one or two people, it needs the whole community!

Just my two pennies worth

DBloke

Follow the path paved with treasure,
For a treacherous journey with little pleasure,
Follow the path that seems much longer,
For a shorter journey and a soul much stronger.

First of all, don't call it "hobbyists" :P  We are all "early adopters", and for most of us D is more than hobby (even if the allocated time is similar). Hobbyism and hobby programs for me is the trivial stuff I write in the Bash shell scripting language (which sucks BTW).


Kyle Furlong wrote:
> I'm becoming more and more convinced that D needs a polished presence. How did Java succeed? Marketing. Plain and simple, the first revisions sucked, but got evangelized extremely effectively. How much better, since we have a quality compiler, to market it.
> 

Matureness must come before marketing.
Still, early "evangelism", as Walter put it, (which I consider different from marketing) is important and does come before matureness, since attracting a good number of (and an influential set of) early adopters is crucial to achieve matureness and "goodness".

> 
> 1. Unified std library which is 100% covered and stable.
> 
> Aside: I am strongly biased to creating this library out of Ares + Mango. No offense Walter, but Sean and Kris' code is higher quality at this point.
> 

True, and here is something were a lot of the work could be done independent of Walter (unlike for instance helping with the compiler, which requires significant interaction)

> 2. Formation of a GUI /team/ to pick and/or develop further a cross platform solution.
> 
> Aside: It must be a team. DWT is stagnant because Shawn doesnt have time, and no one else understands the code well enough to continue.
> 

Huh? "Formation of a GUI team"? That doesn't make sense.
Formation by whom and of whom? You speak as if Walter had control over this issues. Unlike the other points, he hasn't. No one here has authority over the work of the rest of the community, since no one is paying anyone *else* for that work). The only thing Walter can do is "bless" a project he deems more acceptable, which doesn't have much practical effect.

GUI community development strategies must be considered on the face that the GUI community is a collaborative structure, and not a centralized-authoritative structure

No one can exert control of the GUI (or any other for that matter) development, but the community *can come* to certain levels of agreement.

> 3. Choice of a new mascot/revamp of D-man. Also consider a new name.
> 
> Aside: I love the name D. But, the benefits of a name bigger than 2 letters are self evident, it should be considered. Also, D-man has served us well. My initial reaction however, when I was first introduced to him, was, "Wow, what a trashy mascot, how uncreative." Now that I'm used to him, hes alright, but I seriously think we need to reconsider.
> 

A logo is an important marketing and even recognition item, agreed. I just bring a small issue: does the logo necessarily has to an animal/mascot? I'm thinking it doesn't, any type of logo would do.




-- 
Bruno Medeiros - CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D

Anders F Björklund wrote:
> And I won't even think about what would happen to D, without Walter...
> 
> --anders

*shudders at the very thought of that* ...
Walter, please drive safely and be healthy!! :P

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D

Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> Anders F Björklund wrote:
>> And I won't even think about what would happen to D, without Walter...
>>
>> --anders
> 
> *shudders at the very thought of that* ...
> Walter, please drive safely and be healthy!! :P
> 

Oh, that's nice <g> Walter, even if you decide to quit D, stay healthy and drive safely :)

> No offense to those running wiki4d, but it looks like an abandoned site from mid 1990s.

I totally agree, its not the content , its prowiki;  it sucks.  I know thats offense to someone,  but compared with any other wiki it looks extremely lackluster.

Its built on perl ?  Trash it.  I can host a new site if someone can move over the content -- prowiki looks awful and is impossible to navigate.

( sorry for offending anyone. )

Charlie


"nick" <nick.atamas@gmail.com> wrote in message news:e3952j$al5$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> No offense to those running wiki4d, but it looks like an abandoned site from mid 1990s. Anything posted on that site might as well have a huge "don't pay attention to what I'm saying; this is out of date" label on it.
>
> It's unfortunate indeed, because there is some good info there; it just needs a visual update. Last I attempted something in that direction, I was overzealous and apparently offended the man behind wiki4d.
>
>
> Derek Parnell wrote:
> > On Tue, 02 May 2006 18:20:45 -0700, nick wrote:
> >
> >> There is a post like this one every several days.
> >>
> >> I think we need some sort of a notice on the digitalmars page that says "People who want to help polish/improve D follow this link...".
> >>
> >> The link would take you to a TODO list of things that need to happen
for
> >> D to become polished. That way we can channel the enthusiasm to something productive.
> >>
> >> Does such a  list already exist?
> >
> > I think one exists in the WIKI4D site, but if not, that is a good place
to
> > set one up.
> >
> >   http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi
> >

Brad Roberts wrote:
> 
> The recent look/feel updates to wiki4d are good, in general change spurrs activity. :)
> 
> As a step to facilitate even more activity, I just spent an hour or so going through a good portion of the contents of this wiki and created a page to list stale content:
> 
>      http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?StalePages
> 
> In the process, I found this page, which is also a good place to concentrate some energy:
> 
>      http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?HelpDProgress
> 
> Additionally, I added a reference to the StalePages page on this HelpDProgress page.
> 
> I'll be adding to the list of staleness as well as addressing some of the pages that I feel suited to tackle, but a group effort is called for.
> 
> Later,
> Brad

Good idea. "Less is More" is especially true here, as removing stale information adds value to the wiki.

In fact, it would be interesting to call for a collaborative work to clean some (or many) of the wiki parts. A more radical approach, but one which I would support, would be to Garbage Collect the whole thing. (meaning to blank all entries, and then re-enter (or re-edit) those who are still found to be significant). Perhaps a bit too radical?

In any case, I would like to help clean up some of the parts related to language peeves and design issues.
The [DONE] entries should be removed (except perhaps any very recent ones).
Also, the introduction of the Bugzilla makes it redundant for the wiki to report on issues that are merely bugs.

Thinking even further, the wiki could be used as a repository for summaries of the current "discussion state" of design features/peeves/issues. A standardized method and/or page for doing so would even be better. For instance a wiki page lists the common existing design issues, and for each one of those, another wiki entry exists listing a summary/abstract, background(optional), issue description, points and threads argued, community feedback (both negative and positive). Even if Walter doesn't pay attention to it (which is expected) it helps a bit to the community to know what is the current status, and the opinion of the rest of the community members.

I know thar there very standardized and very formalized processes for languages changes in some other languages, and someone with knowledge of these (I haven't) could contribute some good well-based ideas. We don't need nor should have anything that complicated though, just something simple, which is useful enough already.

Opinions, comments, sugestions on what I said, please.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D

Another existing wiki is here

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:D

This one is called "book", but it is also a wiki, with a little bit structure.

There are no limitations, it is not hosted and dependent on a single person, mediawiki is widely accepted, ...

I posted this a bit earlier:

Another existing wiki is here

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:D

This one is called "book", but it is also a wiki, with a little bit structure.

There are no limitations, it is not hosted and dependent on a single person, mediawiki is widely accepted, ...