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As indicated by Mike Parker (a D forum moderator) at the end of the original Having "blessed" 3rd party libraries may make D more popular and stable for building real software. thread from the D improvement (DIP) subforum, further discussion of the topic is required to placed here in the general subforum instead.
Thus, since I created the original thread, I figured I should create the new thread here for anyone who still wished to comment on that thread. People might have waited for either me or a moderator to recreate the thread otherwise, hence it seemed polite to go ahead and make it on behalf of anyone still interested in that so as to not leave anyone waiting on it or confused about whether they could or should make their own thread resurrecting the issue.
So, here you are, for anyone who wants that.
Tangentially, here's also some side commentary of a more personal nature:
As for myself, I am not sure what the future holds.
I am very tired of drifting from programming language to programming language over the years always trying to find a reasonable balance of factors (both expressive and native-level performance, etc... vs sometimes thinking I'll just disregard that and focus on just expressiveness or just project completion pragmatism) and D has looked for the past few months like that language but I have become much less sure of that in light of some of the things mentioned in the original thread.
Even if the precipitous drop in contributions to D is isolated to the Phobos standard library, there still seem to be reasons to be wary. In particular, it still remains unclear whether the language and library ecosystem is a stable base to build upon for real software, which remains the central concern.
I don't even know if the dependencies of many third party libraries are even in a form that can actually be shipped. It is hard to anticipate that in advance, so "jumping at shadows" or going by "feel" or "smell" (such as extrapolating based on whether a library's process seems easy and polished and well documented or not) seems like the strategy I have had to employ in making such estimates. There are many unknowns and there's no way of knowing in advance what will be genuinely usable and shippable in practice or not, since anything could have a hidden pragmatically unfixable problem lurking in it for all I know.
Credit where credit is due: doubtlessly D has had lots of wonderful work put into it and is very worthy of admiration and wider use. I want/wanted to believe in it and intended to build out my own tools for both a game dev idea and an art software tool idea in it (plus miscellaneous personal scripting and utility use), and perhaps even a simple reusable open source GUI engine or a community book eventually if all went especially well, but I am not sure what to think anymore in that regard.
Honestly, taking an even more personal note:
Being a "programming language dilettante" is sort of ruining my life. The cycle of indecision I've been trapped in for many many years has become a destructive pattern that has done more to harm me than almost anything else in my life.
I have squandered practically the entire past decade just running in circles switching between different programming languages and reading countless programming language tutorials and books and messing around in them in aimless ways and basically hardly creating anything real or substantive. That's not the life I wanted for myself, nor is it even a responsible way of living for me at this point given how much time I've lost doing that.
Yet, my personality is apparently so tightly wound that even though I have repeatedly told myself in my own mind and in countless vigorous notes to myself that the final outcome for end users is what really matters I still continue to be trapped in the cycle of indecision and hypervigilance directed at ensuring that my time is not wasted especially given how much time I've already wasted this way.
I feel like I am still waiting for my life as a programmer to begin, but instead have just been spinning in circles ad infinitum while a large part of my lifespan just has slipped away without actually doing any of the things I've intended to do and planned to do for my whole life in regards to software and such. I feel like I'm treading water and making no progress and even slipping backwards regarding some skills and knowledge from disuse.
I don't know what to do honestly.
I wish I could turn back the clock to when working in any programming language or system was pure joy and wonder and not just some amorphous sense of looming liability and risk, but here I am anyway, wishing for years that I could break that cycle of stagnation.
Do you know what I mean? Anyone else here been through the same struggle as a programmer?
To make matters even worse, this is no mere diversion for me. I'm not a hobbyist. I used to work in the AAA game industry briefly but I resigned from that many years ago thinking I'd easily make my own software and games but instead have been trapped in bizarre self-defeating seemingly perpetual indecision for years doing practically nothing real.
I did other things along the way such as working part-time to make ends meet of course and also wrote a couple books, but I seriously need to actually make income from what I program, yet instead I just can't seem to settle on a foundation that feels right and stable enough. That is my overbearing perfectionism in part, surely, but also other kinds of unease mixed in there.
Perhaps other members of the D programming forum (or even just of the whole programming community, independent of language) have also struggled with similar issues here.
What are your thoughts on how to deal with that as individuals and/or as a community?
Who else has struggled in these regards? Has anyone here overcome such self-defeating behavior successfully before?
What paths seem wise to take for those seeking better outcomes?
I know some of that is personal, but I have a feeling programmers of less known languages like here are fairly likely to find this relatable and so perhaps that is a good additional tangent to explore relative to the old thread, if people feel like it. Just throwing that out there as an option.
Anyway, I hope the best for everyone for our future, myself included.
I'm tired of the churn and feeling of always risking building on quicksand. I want what I make to last. I've got to find an effective path forward somehow, whatever it is. I'm not sure what that's going to be at this point though. Today has definitely been a big letdown for me, but that also isn't outside the norm for my pattern of unease and switching languages and approaches faster than I can get anything meaningful done for years on end...
Why I'm like that despite intending so very strongly to be otherwise and even knowing consciously that I am putting too much emphasis on language and tool ideology and not enough on just getting real outcomes created continues to elude me.
Regardless though, I bid you all a good night. Sleep well and thanks for reading.
