On Monday, September 3, 2018 9:41:48 AM MDT Laurent Tréguier via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 15:23:12 UTC, Chris wrote:
> > On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 14:26:46 UTC, Laeeth Isharc
> >
> > wrote:
> >> On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 11:32:42 UTC, Chris wrote:
> >>> [...]
> >>
> >> D has never been about smooth experiences!  That's a commercial benefit if you think that hormesis brings benefits and you are not looking for programmers of the trained-monkey, strap a few APIs together type.
> >
> > It's high time it got a bit smoother if you want people to use it. Is everybody who doesn't use cli and knows all compiler flags by heart a coding monkey? Has it ever occurred to you that people want a smooth experience so they can concentrate on a job and get done with it?
>
> Yes. It almost sounds like a smooth experience would be a bad thing to have, especially with the classic "you don't need an IDE anyway" speech. Editing experience seems often dismissed as unimportant, when it's one of the first things new users will come across when trying out D. First impressions can matter a lot.

Most of the work that gets done is the stuff that the folks contributing think is the most important - frequently what is most important for them for what they do, and very few (if any) of the major contributors use or care about IDEs for their own use. And there's tons to do that has nothing to do with IDEs. There are folks who care about it enough to work on it, which is why projects such as VisualD exist at all, and AFAIK, they work reasonably well, but the only two ways that they're going to get more work done on them than is currently happening is if the folks who care about that sort of thing contribute or if they donate money for it to be worked on. Not long ago, the D Foundation announced that they were going to use donations to pay someone to work on his plugin for Visual Studio Code:

https://forum.dlang.org/post/rmqvglgccmgoajmhynog@forum.dlang.org

So, if you want stuff like that to get worked on, then donate or pitch in.

The situation with D - both with IDEs and in general - has improved greatly over time even if it may not be where you want it to be. But if you're ever expecting IDE support to be a top priority of many of the contributors, then you're going to be sorely disappointed. It's the sort of thing that we care about because we care about D being successful, but it's not the sort of thing that we see any value in whatsoever for ourselves, and selfish as it may be, when we spend the time to contribute to D, we're generally going to work on the stuff that we see as having the most value for getting done what we care about. And there's a lot to get done which impacts pretty much every D user and not just those who want something that's IDE-related.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 16:55:10 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> Most of the work that gets done is the stuff that the folks contributing think is the most important - frequently what is most important for them for what they do, and very few (if any) of the major contributors use or care about IDEs for their own use. And there's tons to do that has nothing to do with IDEs. There are folks who care about it enough to work on it, which is why projects such as VisualD exist at all, and AFAIK, they work reasonably well, but the only two ways that they're going to get more work done on them than is currently happening is if the folks who care about that sort of thing contribute or if they donate money for it to be worked on. Not long ago, the D Foundation announced that they were going to use donations to pay someone to work on his plugin for Visual Studio Code:
>
> https://forum.dlang.org/post/rmqvglgccmgoajmhynog@forum.dlang.org
>
> So, if you want stuff like that to get worked on, then donate or pitch in.
>
> The situation with D - both with IDEs and in general - has improved greatly over time even if it may not be where you want it to be. But if you're ever expecting IDE support to be a top priority of many of the contributors, then you're going to be sorely disappointed. It's the sort of thing that we care about because we care about D being successful, but it's not the sort of thing that we see any value in whatsoever for ourselves, and selfish as it may be, when we spend the time to contribute to D, we're generally going to work on the stuff that we see as having the most value for getting done what we care about. And there's a lot to get done which impacts pretty much every D user and not just those who want something that's IDE-related.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

The complaints I have is exactly why I'm myself maintaining plugins for VSCode, Atom, and others soon. Don't worry, I still think D is worth putting some time and effort into and I know actions generally get more things done than words.
I also know that tons of stuff is yet to be done in regards to the actual compilers and such.

It just baffles me a bit to see the state of D in this department, when languages like Go or Rust (hooray for yet another comparison to Go and Rust) are a lot younger, but already have what looks like very good tooling.
Then again they do have major industry players backing them though...

On Monday, September 3, 2018 11:15:03 AM MDT Laurent Tréguier via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> It just baffles me a bit to see the state of D in this
> department, when languages like Go or Rust (hooray for yet
> another comparison to Go and Rust) are a lot younger, but already
> have what looks like very good tooling.
> Then again they do have major industry players backing them
> though...

The dynamics are fundamentally different when you're paying someone to work on something. As I understand it, in addition to whatever volunteer work is done, Google and Mozilla pay people to work on those languages. And when you're doing that, it's trivial enough to say that you think that something matters enough to pay someone to work on it even if it's not something that anyone contributing actually wants to do or really cares about having for themselves. Relatively little time has been spent contributing to D by people who are paid to work on it. Even if both Walter and Andrei agreed that something should be treated as top priority, aside from paying someone to work on it through the D Foundation, they really can't make anyone work on it. What gets done is usually what the contributors care about. That's one reason why donations could end up being a game changer over time. It makes it possible to pay someone to do something that no contributors want to spend their free time doing.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 16:55:10 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>
> Most of the work that gets done is the stuff that the folks contributing think is the most important - frequently what is most important for them for what they do, and very few (if any) of the major contributors use or care about IDEs for their own use. And there's tons to do that has nothing to do with IDEs. There are folks who care about it enough to work on it, which is why projects such as VisualD exist at all, and AFAIK, they work reasonably well, but the only two ways that they're going to get more work done on them than is currently happening is if the folks who care about that sort of thing contribute or if they donate money for it to be worked on. Not long ago, the D Foundation announced that they were going to use donations to pay someone to work on his plugin for Visual Studio Code:
>
> https://forum.dlang.org/post/rmqvglgccmgoajmhynog@forum.dlang.org
>
> So, if you want stuff like that to get worked on, then donate or pitch in.
>
> The situation with D - both with IDEs and in general - has improved greatly over time even if it may not be where you want it to be. But if you're ever expecting IDE support to be a top priority of many of the contributors, then you're going to be sorely disappointed. It's the sort of thing that we care about because we care about D being successful, but it's not the sort of thing that we see any value in whatsoever for ourselves, and selfish as it may be, when we spend the time to contribute to D, we're generally going to work on the stuff that we see as having the most value for getting done what we care about. And there's a lot to get done which impacts pretty much every D user and not just those who want something that's IDE-related.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

Dear Jonathan, you've just said it. There is no real plan and only problems that someone deems interesting or challenging at a given moment are tackled. If they solve a problem for a lot of users, it's only a side effect. The advent of a D Foundation hasn't changed anything in this regard, and it seems not to be just a financial issue. It's the mentality. In other words, D is still unreliable, and if that what the community wants, fine, but instead of promoting it as a substitute for C/C++, Java etc. it should come with a warning label that says "D is in many parts still at an experimental stage and ships with no guarantees whatsoever. Use at your own risk." That would save both the language developers and (potential) users a lot of headaches.

I think this sort of misunderstanding is the source of a lot of friction on this forum. Some users think (or in my case: thought) that D will be a sound and stable language one day, a language they can use for loads of stuff, while the leadership prefers to keep it at a stage where they can test ideas to see what works and what doesn't, wait let me rephrase this, where the user can test other people's ideas with every new release.

On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 18:26:57 UTC, Chris wrote:
> it should come with a warning label that says "D is in many parts still at an experimental stage and ships with no guarantees whatsoever. Use at your own risk."

Well it comes with the Boost license that says: `THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND`

On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 16:55:10 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> But if you're ever expecting IDE support to be a top priority of many of the contributors, then you're going to be sorely disappointed. It's the sort of thing that we care about because we care about D being successful, but it's not the sort of thing that we see any value in whatsoever for ourselves

Why is that? I've never used an IDE much, but I wonder why you don't and what your impressions are of why many other core D users don't either.

On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 14:26:46 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:

> I just spoke with Dicebot about work stuff.  He incidentally mentioned what I said before based on my impressions.  The people doing work with a language have better things to do than spend a lot of time on forums.  And I think in open source you earn the right to be listened to by doing work of some kind.  He said (which I knew already) it was an old post he didn't put up in the end - somebody discovered it in his repo.  He is working fulltime as a consultant with me for Symmetry and is writing D as part of that role.  I don't think that indicates he didn't mean his criticisms, and maybe one could learn from those.  But a whole thread triggered by this is quite entertaining.

I'm the person how found the post, and I'm enjoying the readings... and I'm learning something also!

I'm amused by the amount of different topics, minus one, the original: why feature branches are not an option in DLangLand.

/Paolo

On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 14:26:46 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> I just spoke with Dicebot about work stuff.  He incidentally mentioned what I said before based on my impressions.  The people doing work with a language have better things to do than spend a lot of time on forums.  And I think in open source you earn the right to be listened to by doing work of some kind.  He said (which I knew already) it was an old post he didn't put up in the end - somebody discovered it in his repo.  He is working fulltime as a consultant with me for Symmetry and is writing D as part of that role.  I don't think that indicates he didn't mean his criticisms, and maybe one could learn from those.  But a whole thread triggered by this is quite entertaining.

Interesting, I did not realize that he had left Sociomantic. Even if he did not release the article, I think it's a good idea that we take some of his criticisms to heart. I, at the very least, agree with at least a few of them, and as we've seen, so do others.

On Monday, September 3, 2018 12:55:01 PM MDT Joakim via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 16:55:10 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
>
> wrote:
> > But if you're ever expecting IDE support to be a top priority of many of the contributors, then you're going to be sorely disappointed. It's the sort of thing that we care about because we care about D being successful, but it's not the sort of thing that we see any value in whatsoever for ourselves
>
> Why is that? I've never used an IDE much, but I wonder why you don't and what your impressions are of why many other core D users don't either.

Because they can't hold a candle to vim. As far as text editing goes, there simply is no comparison. The same goes for emacs. Most of the other capabilities that a typical IDE has are either geared towards dealing with boilerplate stuff that D tries to avoid or can be made to work in programs like vim or emacs if you want them. Personally, I have pretty much all I need with just vim, grep, and gdb. And I lose out on so much with any IDE that there's no point in even considering using one.

vim and emacs (especially vim) have high learning curves, which scares off plenty of programmers, but in general, it seems like most folks who actually take to the time to really learn one of them won't go back to using an IDE if they can help it, because IDEs are very, very poor text editors, and vim and emacs (especially emacs) are far more flexible. Whether your choice is vim or emacs, they both are total powerhouses as code editors, whereas IDEs really are not.

This is an answer that I gave to a similar question on SO several years ago:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2695919/why-do-people-use-command-line-instead-of-ide/2695956#2695956

- Jonathan M Davis

On Monday, September 3, 2018 12:26:57 PM MDT Chris via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> There is no real plan and
> only problems that someone deems interesting or challenging at a
> given moment are tackled. If they solve a problem for a lot of
> users, it's only a side effect. The advent of a D Foundation
> hasn't changed anything in this regard, and it seems not to be
> just a financial issue. It's the mentality. In other words, D is
> still unreliable, and if that what the community wants, fine, but
> instead of promoting it as a substitute for C/C++, Java etc. it
> should come with a warning label that says "D is in many parts
> still at an experimental stage and ships with no guarantees
> whatsoever. Use at your own risk." That would save both the
> language developers and (potential) users a lot of headaches.
>
> I think this sort of misunderstanding is the source of a lot of friction on this forum. Some users think (or in my case: thought) that D will be a sound and stable language one day, a language they can use for loads of stuff, while the leadership prefers to keep it at a stage where they can test ideas to see what works and what doesn't, wait let me rephrase this, where the user can test other people's ideas with every new release.

Plenty of people - whole companies included - use D for real projects and products. It is an extremely powerful tool which can be used for real work. Is it as polished as some other languages? Maybe not, but it's plenty stable for real world use. And it's continually improving.

All programming languages and tools are "used at your own risk." They all come with their own sets of pros and cons. If what you want is a language that doesn't change much, then there are plenty of other choices, just like there are plenty of languages that change all the time. Over time D has become more stable, and it doesn't change anywhere near as rapidly as it used to, but if you don't like how it works or is developed, then feel free to go elsewhere. Those of use that stick around find that its pros outweigh its cons. Plenty of folks disagree with us, and they've chosen different languages, which is just fine.

In any case, I have better things to do than argue about whether D is a solid, useful language or not. It's the language that I prefer. I'm going to use it as much as I can, and I'm going to continue to contribute to it. If you don't like where D is, and you don't think that it's worth your time to contribute to it, then that's perfectly fine, but it's a waste of my time to continue to argue about it. I spend too much of my time in this newsgroup as it is, and this sort of argument doesn't contribute anything to improving D.

- Jonathan M Davis