On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 16:41:36 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 16:21:17 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
>
>> Perhaps this is because we do not have a "Steve Jobs" in our midst--or perhaps we do, and they simply lack confidence that their contribution would be valued and rewarded.
>
> I'm not sure what it means to talk about a Steve Jobs in the context of an open source project. He hired many of the top people, paid very high salaries, and shouted at them until he had a product he wanted to use. It's easy to be a visionary leader if you have billions of dollars to implement your vision.

I was using "Steve Jobs" to mean the kind of person Chris referred to in this quote:

> You'd need someone like Steve Jobs who has a vision and the energy to push his cause.

Feel free to mentally replace it with "a talented leader," if you find Steve Jobs himself objectionable.

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 04:56:20PM +0000, Paul Backus via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 16:41:36 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
[...]
> > I'm not sure what it means to talk about a Steve Jobs in the context of an open source project. He hired many of the top people, paid very high salaries, and shouted at them until he had a product he wanted to use.  It's easy to be a visionary leader if you have billions of dollars to implement your vision.
> 
> I was using "Steve Jobs" to mean the kind of person Chris referred to in this quote:
> 
> > You'd need someone like Steve Jobs who has a vision and the energy to push his cause.
> 
> Feel free to mentally replace it with "a talented leader," if you find Steve Jobs himself objectionable.

You're missing the point, which is the Steve Jobs had billions of dollars at his disposal and could (and undoubtedly did) use it to pay people to implement his vision, whereas Walter does not have billions of dollars at his disposal and cannot motivate volunteers to do what he wants with money.

Had Steve Jobs *not* been in the position to hire people with billions of dollars, perhaps a lot less might have come of his vision.


T

-- 
Heads I win, tails you lose.

On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 16:56:20 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
> On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 16:41:36 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>> On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 16:21:17 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
>>
>>> Perhaps this is because we do not have a "Steve Jobs" in our midst--or perhaps we do, and they simply lack confidence that their contribution would be valued and rewarded.
>>
>> I'm not sure what it means to talk about a Steve Jobs in the context of an open source project. He hired many of the top people, paid very high salaries, and shouted at them until he had a product he wanted to use. It's easy to be a visionary leader if you have billions of dollars to implement your vision.
>
> I was using "Steve Jobs" to mean the kind of person Chris referred to in this quote:
>
>> You'd need someone like Steve Jobs who has a vision and the energy to push his cause.
>
> Feel free to mentally replace it with "a talented leader," if you find Steve Jobs himself objectionable.

I don't find Steve Jobs objectionable, I just don't think there's anything to be gained from pretending there's an equivalent for an open source project. Maybe the closest would be Rich Hickey, and Clojure's not exactly setting the world on fire.

It doesn't seem all that difficult to figure out what D needs: IDE support, a good package manager, solid libraries, and good documentation all come to mind. We need volunteers willing to do hard work and/or funding to pay people to do the hard work.

On 6/26/2020 9:26 AM, Avrina wrote:
> I could ask the same thing of the post I replied to.

Many D community members have stepped up at their own initiative to become the leader of various parts.

This is grossly off-topic.

I am a long-time lurker still debating how to dip my toes in BetterC, but I have read these forums, watched DConf videos and perused library code.

Phobos is great because the parts I looked at are the first time I have grokked library code, it is so well-written. Part of it is down to the language offering "developability", the rest is down to good taste I guess :-) I could understand at a high-level whatever was going on, before ever writing a single line of D.

The complaints cropping up all the time make the forum so bloody unproductive (sorry for using strong words. is it just regular free-riding ingrates? or some other types? why this overdose just on D forums!). Anyway, let me pontificate too.

Leadership, past and present: please ignore all non-contributors' complaints, just expect them to write up a technical bug report/enhancement proposal (unless you enjoy riling them up). You have continued to make your bleeding edge ideas openly available, and don't really need to respond to second-guessing by non-language designers. I don't know any other project of this size with the founders remaining involved this deeply, you have a lot of stamina to be replying to less-knowledgeable strangers too.

Contributor-driven forum threads have been so much more substantive, but their open availability is what gives a newcomer pause. I think it is legitimate to do that in a less discoverable place than the forums. Because right now, between auto-decode default and the complaints of contributors about process as well as direction, I don't know how newcomers can shake the feeling that this is Walter's and Andrei's long-term lab!

Contributors: you must have left C++ too far behind, you wouldn't deign to suggest changes in that morass. Just because this is a more open place with a direct line to leadership, you seem to want equal footing for your approaches. I don't think it is too much to expect that you defer to Walter's choices because he does have a fuller view. Contributing to his considered vision can't be of no ongoing benefit.

Users: please try to derate your negativity by acknowledging the possibility that language and library design is hard, and other language communities likely have all of these debates but not overtly publicly. By all means, look for stability but do not look for perfection. D is likely better than most any natively-compiled language, it is just that you won't hear false assurances of no breakage across releases - it is software made by few minds, and there will be the odd regression.

On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 16:21:17 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
> On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 15:06:03 UTC, Chris wrote:
>>
>> Once you are a leader you have to stop developing and start coordinating things. If you try to do both you'll fail. I said this years ago. You love PLs and programming too much to be a leader, you want to write good code (so does Walter). You should never have become a leader in the first place. You'd need someone like Steve Jobs who has a vision and the energy to push his cause.
>
> This raises the question: where can D community to find such a person?
>
> There is an opportunity for someone with strong communication and organizational skills to do a great service for the D community by stepping up and filling this leadership vacuum. So far, no one has done so. Perhaps this is because we do not have a "Steve Jobs" in our midst--or perhaps we do, and they simply lack confidence that their contribution would be valued and rewarded.
>
> It is worth thinking about what might be done to encourage such a person to volunteer, and what obstacles might currently be standing in their way.


It can be done. The problem is the mindset that those things are not important or people complaining about such stuff are unproductive idiots who have nothing to do with their life but spend all day (...in their mind) spamming the D forum, so to speak.

We all get paid for writing code. But there's a tool maker and there's a tool user. A tool user can also be another person's tool user.

Again its the mindset, not everyone has that level of polish and UX mind/priority. Some have never written user facing code where it has to be done is such a way regular people (in D's case the tool user) can feel comfortable to pick up.

It all depends on the mindset, I don't believe it has to do with being a (hard core) programmer or anything like it. I've seen D tools well polished with good UX. Some value communication and organizational skills naturally. The basic elements you learn in some high schools or in entrepreneurship class needed to make ventures succeed and grow, in addition to other agents.

In D's case, its hard to tell. Some think money is the only way to attract talents and they'll only pick that from the Steve jobs analogy.

At the end of the day, its all about trying to make D better.

On Saturday, 27 June 2020 at 09:44:01 UTC, aberba wrote:
> On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 16:21:17 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
>> On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 15:06:03 UTC, Chris wrote:
>>>
>>> Once you are a leader you have to stop developing and start coordinating things. If you try to do both you'll fail. I said this years ago. You love PLs and programming too much to be a leader, you want to write good code (so does Walter). You should never have become a leader in the first place. You'd need someone like Steve Jobs who has a vision and the energy to push his cause.
>>
>> This raises the question: where can D community to find such a person?
>>
>> There is an opportunity for someone with strong communication and organizational skills to do a great service for the D community by stepping up and filling this leadership vacuum. So far, no one has done so. Perhaps this is because we do not have a "Steve Jobs" in our midst--or perhaps we do, and they simply lack confidence that their contribution would be valued and rewarded.
>>
>> It is worth thinking about what might be done to encourage such a person to volunteer, and what obstacles might currently be standing in their way.
>
>
> It can be done. The problem is the mindset that those things are not important or people complaining about such stuff are unproductive idiots who have nothing to do with their life but spend all day (...in their mind) spamming the D forum, so to speak.
>
> We all get paid for writing code. But there's a tool maker and there's a tool user. A tool user can also be another person's tool user.
>
> Again its the mindset, not everyone has that level of polish and UX mind/priority. Some have never written user facing code where it has to be done is such a way regular people (in D's case the tool user) can feel comfortable to pick up.
>
> It all depends on the mindset, I don't believe it has to do with being a (hard core) programmer or anything like it. I've seen D tools well polished with good UX. Some value communication and organizational skills naturally. The basic elements you learn in some high schools or in entrepreneurship class needed to make ventures succeed and grow, in addition to other agents.
>
> In D's case, its hard to tell. Some think money is the only way to attract talents and they'll only pick that from the Steve jobs analogy.
>
> At the end of the day, its all about trying to make D better.

Well put. I think what's missing is a general vision. There are too many "subthreads" going on. Everybody has their pet features or need just one specific thing out of D an that's that (I suppose some users / companies are happy with a subset of D and don't care about the rest that might be important to others). The problem is that the "leaders" should not actively develop as this narrows the field of vision, and if a company sponsors D but only focuses on the one aspect that is important to them, then it cannot really be a "general purpose" language.

What you basically need is someone like Steve Jobs (metaphorically speaking) who sees the bigger picture and says "cut that crap" when necessary.

On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 21:00:43 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 6/26/2020 9:26 AM, Avrina wrote:
>> I could ask the same thing of the post I replied to.
>
> Many D community members have stepped up at their own initiative to become the leader of various parts.

Go ahead and list some. I already have a feeling I know what the trend is going to be like.

On 6/27/2020 5:07 AM, Avrina wrote:
>> Many D community members have stepped up at their own initiative to become the leader of various parts.
> Go ahead and list some. I already have a feeling I know what the trend is going to be like.

Rainer does the Win64 and VS support. Brad Roberts initiated, built, and ran the test servers for many years. He did bugzilla too. Iain does GDC. The LDC team is entirely self-selected. Jacob does the Objective-C support. Vladimir wrote the Dforum software (and many other indispensable tools). And on and on for nearly every part of the D system.

You want something to happen? Step up and make it happen.