June 27, 2022 Re: Civility | ||||
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 Posted in reply to Ola Fosheim Grøstad | On Sunday, 26 June 2022 at 15:10:42 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote: >I think it is a good idea to focus on the "big issues" as those most likely are the ones that make people reduce their activity and use the language less. One small problem a day. The experience changes every day. Isn't it good? | |||
June 27, 2022 Re: Civility | ||||
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 Posted in reply to zjh | On Monday, 27 June 2022 at 00:20:06 UTC, zjh wrote: >
I understand what you are saying, but basically all languages, except C, have a more attractive memory management solution. D also needs to get some real benefits from ‘shared’ and clear move semantics/RAII. So starting with big things matters. If we don’t start now then it will never be done and then you will never get the attention of C++ programmers. We can avoid mistakes by keeping it separate from regular D until it is a good solution. If it turns out bad, just abandon it. | |||
June 28, 2022 Re: Civility | ||||
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Posted in reply to Ola Fosheim Grøstad | On Monday, 27 June 2022 at 20:57:40 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote: except C, have a more attractive memory management solution. D also needs to get some real benefits from ‘shared’ and clear move semantics/RAII. So starting with big things matters. If we don’t start now then it will never be done and then you will never get the attention of C++ programmers. I mean, Priority of problems: it should be sorted according to | |||
June 28, 2022 Re: Civility | ||||
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Posted in reply to zjh | On Tuesday, 28 June 2022 at 00:27:15 UTC, zjh wrote: >I mean, «Big problems» need high level decisions to be made first. Then design. Then a break down into tasks. Small problems are in the issue tracker, but could probably be broken down to a todo list as you say. | |||
June 28, 2022 Re: Civility | ||||
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 Posted in reply to Ola Fosheim Grøstad | On Sunday, 26 June 2022 at 11:58:31 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote: >Yes, I agree, but D has to be a language that C++ programmers want to use in their spare time, so it has to less complex with clean syntax and not try to become like C++. There is also no point in becoming a language like Rust. I agree, we should stay out of the conplex. After all, D is a highly readable language. Why should we break your motivation? It should focus on a single subject, to make an error-free language. Even if we don't develop it for a while... SDB@79 | |||
June 28, 2022 Re: Civility | ||||
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 Posted in reply to Walter Bright | On Friday, 24 June 2022 at 02:48:32 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: > Thanks for your kind words, Don! And thanks for recounting your success story with converting C to D. > > Frankly, it has a lot to do with marketing. We're all engineers here, not marketers, and it shows. This begs the question why no marketer ever approached the D community to embrace the product. If a clever marketer sees potential s/he will certainly have a go at it. Have you ever been approached by marketer about D? > Since you brought up the music business, it's the same thing. It's only partially a meritocracy. The rest is skill at marketing, packaging, and promotion. Even The Beatles languished in obscurity until they met Epstein. This is sadly true, isn't it weird that so many famous female classical musicians have the perfect looks for fashion magazines? That's statistically not possible. Image over talent, that also happens in other genres like Blues, Rock and Jazz. > My own C compiler did poorly until I partnered with John Haggins, a born marketer. Wow, what a difference he made! > > I've known many engineers over the years who created very nice products. They'd come and complain to me that there was no uptake, what should they do? I replied that they needed marketing and promotion, and I'd outline things they needed to do (like write articles, give presentations at conferences, etc.). > > None of them would do this. Several had the attitude that it was unethical to do any marketing and promotion. The rest just didn't want to make the effort. All wound up very discouraged and bitter. > You sure can't blame the lack of marketing for D's relative obscurity. What about all the initially enthusiastic users who abandoned D for technical reasons not because of the lack of marketing? Other small open source languages attract users and contributors without much hype too. In D's case it's not just the marketing. It's the many unresolved issues the language has (I won't reiterate them here). Harsh criticism of D usually comes from users who are / were really interested in D, not from the random developer who has to churn out silly apps for smart phones. The usual steps after discovering D are roughly like this: enthusiasm > start a project in D > experience / proficiency > slowly discover all the flaws > despair > no remedy in sight > good-bye. Of course, each Reddit thread or whatever attracts the criticism of ex-users and / or long-time observers. As for the hairshirt business, it does not help to rephrase things in a positive way. That's called framing and is usually a sign of decay. Once we're asked to use politically correct language, we know that there are issues we're not allowed to talk about. That won't make the issues go away though. | |||
June 28, 2022 Re: Civility | ||||
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 Posted in reply to Max Samukha | On Friday, 24 June 2022 at 04:43:34 UTC, Max Samukha wrote: >Another lie is "There's no such thing as bad publicity”. Bad press is bad. Threads like "Why D is unpopular?" shouldn't reach 1000 posts. 1000 posts in which it was not necessary to use "Godwin's law" seems like a great success to me :-) D is "so open" and developers so heterogeneous. It is normal that, time to time, forum will transform in a real agora where all this egos and ideas are confronted... It is not good for enterprise/marketing purposes, but very democratic. May be a trending analysis of these "threads" and some participant profile correlation could be useful. Better than banning this kind of threads (in my opinion) is to give developers a "quick" way to expose it's needs (without discussions) and to know the needs of other developers (without confrontation) based on surveys:
What if "dub" proposes time to time a link to an official "D" survey? It will attract people using D that is not participating on forum threads. May be it shows up a better picture of the community and reduces the need of "visions" confrontation. | |||
June 28, 2022 Re: Civility | ||||
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Posted in reply to Antonio | On Tuesday, 28 June 2022 at 13:33:58 UTC, Antonio wrote: >What if "dub" proposes time to time a link to an official "D" survey? It will attract people using D that is not participating on forum threads. Sure, but I think there should be more forums. At least one advocacy forum relating to features/process and more than one question/answer forum. It would not hurt to add:
And also add a section called Frameworks with forums such as:
That could make it easier for people getting started with the more promising frameworks. Yes, it is preferential treatment… but maybe that is positive given the limited presence on StackOverflow. | |||
June 29, 2022 Re: Civility | ||||
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 Posted in reply to Ola Fosheim Grøstad |
On 29/06/2022 1:51 AM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> Yes, it is preferential treatment… but maybe that is positive given the limited presence on StackOverflow.
What has appeared to happen is most people who would otherwise use SO have moved to Discord.
Not that we were getting many questions there to begin with.
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June 28, 2022 Re: Civility | ||||
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Posted in reply to rikki cattermole | On Tuesday, 28 June 2022 at 13:55:16 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote: >Not that we were getting many questions there to begin with. Newbies might not use that… One should try to consolidate less experienced users behind the frameworks that are «complete» and that has existed for some time, and also reduce the threshold for starting using them. The volume of such topical forums might be low, but the answers would not be lost, like they are in the Learn forums. Newbies might have a high threshold of asking questions (fear of being perceived as incompetent etc) and might have trouble figuring out what to search for (which also is very tedious). | |||
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