On Tuesday, 9 January 2024 at 21:11:39 UTC, Walter Bright 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++.
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.
Of course, I personally do not want to see this split at all. This is a rather serious issue where both projects can suffer.
With regards to the Forked project - I am just sitting on the fence to see how it turns out. It could be successful and, if so, more power to Adam and contributors. If it fails.. even badly, I will still take my hat off for their attempted effort. We do live in an (internet) age where people like to bash and put people down. I refuse to be one of those people. Same can be said on this forum on a number of ocassions, and lots towards Walter and a few others.
Coming back to Walter - I do understand his position and his comment (above) confirms that this is the right mindset whether people like it or not. D is a very good language and I don't think Walter should just add new things if he is not 100% commited to it. Some things could be great at the time but could be a mistake in 10 years - and D will then be stuck with it.
I think the reason why I am not frustrated with certain features not making it into the language is because D has many of what I need. However I understand that there are people that dont agree and waited some time for progress of said feature with nothing as a result.
I do believe that OpenD will divert away from D pretty quickly, merging new features within the first 6 months. It will divert so quickly that even if there is a chance of agreement between the two projects, they are simply too far apart to put back together without some plan.
On top of this, OpenD could be including a bunch of things that I personally do not care about. It could change the direction of the language itself. This is why I am sitting on the fence. It might still serve my purposes or it (very much) wont.