On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 13:19:01 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>
>> PS For D zealots: add your favorite insult here, e.g. "entitled [...]"
>
> These statements would be better left on Slashdot...they don't help your case, they make it look like you're unreasonable.

Ah well, damned if you do and damned if you don't. It's only that I've been called names here before and often the replies have been more on the esoteric side of things. But what did Joakim actually post that was so weird? I think D is getting to a stage where it's more of a religion than a tool. The signs are there:

1. criticism is considered weird / unreasonable (blasphemous?), sure we all know that Earth is a disc

2. topics are not addressed and the answers are often evasive and / or of a general philosophical or anecdotal nature

3. I've said it before: personal mistakes, wrong design decisions, are socialized and the whole community is "guilty" and has to "learn". I have a different take on leadership.

4. "At least we're not C++!"

This is usually a sign of decay. But honestly, it's all been said over the years and nothing has changed...or changed for the worse.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 13:43:46 UTC, Chris wrote:
> Ah well, damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Ignore criticisms... latch onto one superficial point in comment... proceed to call unreasonable...

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 08:02:30 UTC, JN wrote:
> more behind the scenes, around the same level of popularity as Nim, Crystal.

Since i think this is a talk about popularity...

I feel that Nim and Crystal have WAY more adoption/popularity than D, but im not sure if both are backed by any great group (like Rust).

So I think a good point to focus this discussion is, why Nim and Crystal got the lead in popularity but not D?

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 11:52:18 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 09:56:48 UTC, Nierjerson wrote:
>> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
>>
>> Yes D has failed if the goal is wide adoption. [...]
>
> Well, what can I say that hasn't been said before (including this thread)? Since I said good-bye to D last year my productivity has increased incredibly. I read a few days ago that Joakim had left the community (he once asked me why my attitude had changed so drastically). And you know what, it made me kinda sad. Do things like that even register with the D Foundation  and / or community? One answer was "this would be an excellent topic for this year's GSoC", which is a total and utter lack of respect (although I hasten to say that I think the poster wasn't aware of this and didn't intend it this way). It has never occurred to the D leadership that Android and iOS are more important to developers than introducing yet another RefFancyTemplateCTFERangeAllocator which is memory safe, but not really, but it will be after DIP2001.
>
> 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!?
>
> It's the year 2019 (D is almost 20 years old), a lot of new languages have a sounder approach than D, they see what works and what doesn't, what programmers need (e.g. ARM) and what they don't need. Which is being pragmatic, and being pragmatic is a thing that D claims to be. A joke. Programmers need to get sh*t done, you know?
>
> 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.
>
> The sad thing is that D had it all long before younger languages had it, but it preferred to drink all its money in the pub, dreaming of fancy features, mañana, mañana...
>
> PS For D zealots: add your favorite insult here, e.g. "entitled [...]"

Interesting.

While I don't know your work with Dlang, I quite regret having Joaking leaving the community.
He contributed greatly to the Android port, code reviews, and LDC, to name a few. He helped me alot with reviews and feedback on bugs.
I hope he would change his mind someday.

I'm fascinated on what makes you, or any other poster vent on the forums?
Assuming trolling is out of the question.

If you find that Dlang doesn't work for you, and there is no match between expectations and reality, I think one would just mind their business and move on.
One would think that having so vivid reactions on things that don't work out for you, would mean that you have a vested interest.

There are open PRs that sit on Github rotting, you have a list of bugs that you added but you got no response or some unsatisfactory response, you donated a bunch of money for a goal that was not realized. Something?

I can see that constructive criticism can be applied anytime, this is desired and healthy. There are really annoying things with Dlang management, I really hate the whole Interpolated Strings debacle for example, but I see that there is wish to improve and steps are made to fix them.

Anyhow, as strange as it sounds, I just wish that there would be more of Joakim's type in the detractors list then whatever we have now.

On 12.04.19 15:37, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 13:22:32 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
>> On 12.04.19 09:35, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
>>>
>>> I honestly feel like D is a failure. I kinda just wanted to vent about it and see what other people think.
>>
>> I honestly feel like D is a big success. The failure is your own.
> 
> Thank You for this well thought out response,

You are welcome.

> you completely changed my mind, it's obvious you took my feelings/opinion seriously...
> 

On the off chance that this is sarcasm, let me elaborate: It seems like you picked up D hoping it would become more popular than it has. Personally, I don't care about popularity.

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 13:50:42 UTC, SrMordred wrote:
> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 08:02:30 UTC, JN wrote:
>> more behind the scenes, around the same level of popularity as Nim, Crystal.
>
> Since i think this is a talk about popularity...
>
> I feel that Nim and Crystal have WAY more adoption/popularity than D, but im not sure if both are backed by any great group (like Rust).
>
> So I think a good point to focus this discussion is, why Nim and Crystal got the lead in popularity but not D?

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.

https://crystal-lang.org/reference/overview/

https://nim-lang.org/docs/backends.html

Mind you, the first thing a lot of people ask is "Can I use it on mobile and is it painless to do so?". This is the reality of things. Kotlin devs realized that. Language adoption is not _only_ about language features, it's about usefulness too. This is why they simplified Scala.

I don't know about Crystal and Nim (they're still very young), but Kotlin, for example, ships with certain guarantees that give you security. Updates usually bring new and useful features that are not random and don't break existing code. I know, some people may be tempted to say "Ah, that's a language for mediocre coders, real wizards use D, those who read their books in binary format!" But what good is a language you cannot really use as a "general purpose" language, and general purpose includes multiple platforms.

On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 07:35:05AM +0000, Tofu Kaitlyn via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
> I honestly feel like D is a failure.
[...]
> I duno... what do yall think? Is D going to somehow explode in popularity in 5-10 years?
[...]

There lies the problem: you're equating success with popularity.  They can be correlated, to some extent, but they are certainly not the same thing.

Personally, I couldn't care less about popularity. After what I've seen in the industry over the past 2-3 decades, I've become very cynical about popularity.  What I *do* care for is a language with strong technical merit. D has that, to some extent -- I'm not going to pretend D is perfect either, as I do find a lot to be desired in it.  But it's much better than the alternatives I've tried, so for the time being, it's my language of choice.

But obviously, YMMV.


T

-- 
War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left. -- BSD Games' Fortune

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 11:52:18 UTC, Chris wrote:
> (e.g. ARM)

There's https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases/download/v1.15.0/ldc2-1.15.0-linux-aarch64.tar.xz

The D Language frontend merged into GCC9 [0]. Why would they add support for a failed language ?

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/gcc-9/changes.html

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 13:57:24 UTC, Radu wrote:
>
> Interesting.
>
> While I don't know your work with Dlang, I quite regret having Joaking leaving the community.
> He contributed greatly to the Android port, code reviews, and LDC, to name a few. He helped me alot with reviews and feedback on bugs.
> I hope he would change his mind someday.

The question is: What made him leave? Nobody seems to care about that, which I find both surprising and sad. He wasn't just a random user, you know?

> I'm fascinated on what makes you, or any other poster vent on the forums?
> Assuming trolling is out of the question.

No, I'm not trolling, I don't even visit the forum regularly anymore.

> If you find that Dlang doesn't work for you, and there is no match between expectations and reality, I think one would just mind their business and move on.

The blame is constantly put on the user "your expectations were too high, what did you expect?". It doesn't occur to anyone that the completely chaotic language development may turn people off? As you mentioned (high) expectations, you're indirectly admitting that D is sub-substandard. "D is great! But don't expect too much!" That's funny.

> One would think that having so vivid reactions on things that don't work out for you, would mean that you have a vested interest.

Conjecture and assumptions. Now you tell me what possible vested interest I could have. Do you think I'm a shill of Big Software that wants to destroy small software? Yeah no, don't address the criticism but accuse critics of having a vested interest. It's an all too common pattern when people begin to realize that the emperor is wearing no clothes.[1]

> There are open PRs that sit on Github rotting, you have a list of bugs that you added but you got no response or some unsatisfactory response, you donated a bunch of money for a goal that was not realized. Something?

Where should I start?

> I can see that constructive criticism can be applied anytime, this is desired and healthy. There are really annoying things with Dlang management, I really hate the whole Interpolated Strings debacle for example, but I see that there is wish to improve and steps are made to fix them.

D would have to be rewritten. It's become unmaintainable. Also, constructive criticism is usually shrugged off with the remark "What did you expect? A functional language? Go on!"


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes