March 11, 2018
On Sunday, 11 March 2018 at 01:50:22 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> On Sunday, 11 March 2018 at 01:36:51 UTC, Dylan Graham wrote:
>
>>
>> The D Language Foundation, being the leading body of D, should hold some responsibility to the interests of the majority.
>
> Please read my post from earlier:
>
> https://forum.dlang.org/post/chsqspkoxbcdqjcqbfjc@forum.dlang.org
>
> The survey *will* have an influence on what gets priority in the future, but it certainly can't be seen as representing the majority of D programming interests.
>

Good. That's definitely for the better.

>>
>> It is not a dictatorship (read this sentence over and over till you get it).
>
> No one is forcing you to use BetterC and its existence doesn't change anything about how you can use the language. Obviously, there are a number of areas that need work. The survey can help decide which of those to put resources into first, but it doesn't mean that other things deemed important have to be dropped.

That sentence was to counter psychoticRabbit. I didn't mean it literally. If you've read my earlier posts, it's not BetterC I have an issue with, it's the allocation of time.

As you said, hopefully the survey will help clear up these issues with D.
March 11, 2018
On Sunday, 11 March 2018 at 01:46:09 UTC, Dylan Graham wrote:
>
> Rust was more popular and who could use that?
> Rust is popular because of its ideas, not because it pandered.


I don't see "programmer" portability as being pandering.

It common sense.

Rust is good, in that it seeks to do something different. I like that.

But I live in the real world, and need to switch between languages often.

Language theory is nice and all that, but "programmer" portability is paramount for me.. not popular ideas.

And Rust is popular... with Rust programmers.

March 11, 2018
On Sunday, 11 March 2018 at 01:53:30 UTC, Dylan Graham wrote:
>
> That sentence was to counter psychoticRabbit. I didn't mean it literally. If you've read my earlier posts, it's not BetterC I have an issue with, it's the allocation of time.
>

Well that should have been the basis of your original argument.

i.e. How can the D Foundation encourage new additional resoures to focus on things that also matter to the community.

Instead, you started by attacking the D Foundation for allocating resources to betterc.

March 11, 2018
On Sunday, 11 March 2018 at 01:58:50 UTC, psychoticRabbit wrote:
>
> i.e. How can the D Foundation encourage new additional resoures to focus on things that also matter to the community.
>


and btw. the mention about strengthing the use of DIPS, does just that.

there are many improvement to 'process' that can be done to encourage more people to contribute to D.

This is not about betterc at all, really.


March 11, 2018
On Sunday, 11 March 2018 at 01:58:50 UTC, psychoticRabbit wrote:
> On Sunday, 11 March 2018 at 01:53:30 UTC, Dylan Graham wrote:
>>
>> That sentence was to counter psychoticRabbit. I didn't mean it literally. If you've read my earlier posts, it's not BetterC I have an issue with, it's the allocation of time.
>>
>
> Well that should have been the basis of your original argument.

I stated that in my second reply to you.

> i.e. How can the D Foundation encourage new additional resoures to focus on things that also matter to the community.
>
> Instead, you started by attacking the D Foundation for allocating resources to betterc.

You've got me there. I could've done much better to convince.
March 11, 2018
On Sunday, 11 March 2018 at 02:02:15 UTC, psychoticRabbit wrote:
> On Sunday, 11 March 2018 at 01:58:50 UTC, psychoticRabbit wrote:
>>
>> i.e. How can the D Foundation encourage new additional resoures to focus on things that also matter to the community.
>>
>
>
> and btw. the mention about strengthing the use of DIPS, does just that.
>
> there are many improvement to 'process' that can be done to encourage more people to contribute to D.
>
> This is not about betterc at all, really.

Then it does seem like things will improve. I hope there will be more surveys in the future and I'm very happy with the new DIP process.

My original argument was that BetterC is a mismanagement of resources, and I still stand by that.
March 10, 2018
On 03/10/2018 05:47 AM, Dylan Graham wrote:
> On Saturday, 10 March 2018 at 10:05:49 UTC, rumbu wrote:
>>
>> According to the State of D Survey, 71% of the respondents don't care about betterC. Why is betterC on the priority list?
> 
> Yeah. Why should D worry about tying itself into C when it can't even interface with itself through DLLs?

First of all, betterC is about far more than interfacing with C. In fact, interop with C isn't really what betterC is about at all - that's a separate aspect of the language. (And those C/C++ users who still haven't come to D - for many of them the holdout is *because* of the issues betterC aims to address. Make no mistake, for all the stockholm syndrome in the C and C++ worlds, there *are* a lot people openly wanting to jump ship but don't have a sufficient option yet. Heck, *I'm* a C/C++ -> D convert.)

But more importantly:

The D language itself is specifically designed and intended to be multi-purpose. Because of that, D users (and potential D users) are *highly* diverse. Everybody here has their own use-cases, their own needs and priorities, and their own list of things they want fixed yesterday.

In a group this diverse, there just simply *isn't* much on the D wishlist that's crucially important to a *majority*, because we all need completely different things.

Personally, better DLL support have little to no impact on me. Obviously it does for you, and I sympathise. Some of the things most important to me for D to improve you probably wouldn't care one bit about - and that's ok. We work on different sorts of things.

Improved betterC is something I would find very nice if I ever have time or opportunity to get back into embedded software. But outside of that, yea, it doesn't impact me much more than it does for you.

But here's the rub: In this crowd here, probably far more than most languages, we all have such wildly varying needs that 29% *is* what qualifies as significant around here. Most wishlist items are going to have similarly non-majority numbers. And they have to pick *something* to focus on. Luckily, as the vision document clearly states, there are *several* such "somethings" the dlang foundation is committing to working on.
March 10, 2018
IMO this should be the priority:

1. blockers (things that can't be worked around at all or not without
jumping through a lot of hoops)
2. everything else

dmd still doesn't support shared libraries on OSX (cf
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12190)

That prevents a whole category of use cases (eg D plugins called from
C++ or from D)





On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 8:06 PM, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d-announce <digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:
> On 03/10/2018 05:47 AM, Dylan Graham wrote:
>>
>> On Saturday, 10 March 2018 at 10:05:49 UTC, rumbu wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> According to the State of D Survey, 71% of the respondents don't care about betterC. Why is betterC on the priority list?
>>
>>
>> Yeah. Why should D worry about tying itself into C when it can't even interface with itself through DLLs?
>
>
> First of all, betterC is about far more than interfacing with C. In fact, interop with C isn't really what betterC is about at all - that's a separate aspect of the language. (And those C/C++ users who still haven't come to D - for many of them the holdout is *because* of the issues betterC aims to address. Make no mistake, for all the stockholm syndrome in the C and C++ worlds, there *are* a lot people openly wanting to jump ship but don't have a sufficient option yet. Heck, *I'm* a C/C++ -> D convert.)
>
> But more importantly:
>
> The D language itself is specifically designed and intended to be multi-purpose. Because of that, D users (and potential D users) are *highly* diverse. Everybody here has their own use-cases, their own needs and priorities, and their own list of things they want fixed yesterday.
>
> In a group this diverse, there just simply *isn't* much on the D wishlist that's crucially important to a *majority*, because we all need completely different things.
>
> Personally, better DLL support have little to no impact on me. Obviously it does for you, and I sympathise. Some of the things most important to me for D to improve you probably wouldn't care one bit about - and that's ok. We work on different sorts of things.
>
> Improved betterC is something I would find very nice if I ever have time or opportunity to get back into embedded software. But outside of that, yea, it doesn't impact me much more than it does for you.
>
> But here's the rub: In this crowd here, probably far more than most languages, we all have such wildly varying needs that 29% *is* what qualifies as significant around here. Most wishlist items are going to have similarly non-majority numbers. And they have to pick *something* to focus on. Luckily, as the vision document clearly states, there are *several* such "somethings" the dlang foundation is committing to working on.
March 11, 2018
On Sunday, 11 March 2018 at 04:06:13 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
> On 03/10/2018 05:47 AM, Dylan Graham wrote:
>> On Saturday, 10 March 2018 at 10:05:49 UTC, rumbu wrote:
>>>
>>> According to the State of D Survey, 71% of the respondents don't care about betterC. Why is betterC on the priority list?
>> 
>> Yeah. Why should D worry about tying itself into C when it can't even interface with itself through DLLs?
>
> First of all, betterC is about far more than interfacing with C. In fact, interop with C isn't really what betterC is about at all - that's a separate aspect of the language. (And those C/C++ users who still haven't come to D - for many of them the holdout is *because* of the issues betterC aims to address. Make no mistake, for all the stockholm syndrome in the C and C++ worlds, there *are* a lot people openly wanting to jump ship but don't have a sufficient option yet. Heck, *I'm* a C/C++ -> D convert.)
>
> But more importantly:
>
> The D language itself is specifically designed and intended to be multi-purpose. Because of that, D users (and potential D users) are *highly* diverse. Everybody here has their own use-cases, their own needs and priorities, and their own list of things they want fixed yesterday.
>
> In a group this diverse, there just simply *isn't* much on the D wishlist that's crucially important to a *majority*, because we all need completely different things.
>
> Personally, better DLL support have little to no impact on me. Obviously it does for you, and I sympathise. Some of the things most important to me for D to improve you probably wouldn't care one bit about - and that's ok. We work on different sorts of things.
>
> Improved betterC is something I would find very nice if I ever have time or opportunity to get back into embedded software. But outside of that, yea, it doesn't impact me much more than it does for you.
>
> But here's the rub: In this crowd here, probably far more than most languages, we all have such wildly varying needs that 29% *is* what qualifies as significant around here. Most wishlist items are going to have similarly non-majority numbers. And they have to pick *something* to focus on. Luckily, as the vision document clearly states, there are *several* such "somethings" the dlang foundation is committing to working on.

You do have a good point. One of my likes for D was its flexibility, so it was very hypocritical of me to argue for what I did.

I regret some of things I said. I'm sorry for any offence caused, specifically towards members of the DLF.

I wish that DLL support was referenced in the vision document. I actually like most of what's been said in it, especially the @safe, @nogc and editor support. I also see Benjamin Thaut (if you're reading this - awesome work!) making progress on DLL support, I just wish the foundation could help him out a bit.
March 11, 2018
On Sunday, 11 March 2018 at 05:41:02 UTC, Dylan Graham wrote:
>
> I regret some of things I said. I'm sorry for any offence caused, specifically towards members of the DLF.
>

I don't think you need to regret saying anything. You've demonstrated a willingness to engage in a conversation that we can *all* learn from.

I also doubt anyone actually got offended ;-)

.. we're all pretty strong minded here.

But I get back to my point about "programmer" portability.

Other developers of newer languages just don't seem to get that.

And it's hardly surprising that D would be focused in some way, on languages used by the vast majority of programmers (C/C++/Java/C#... and dare I say it..python)

That is D's great strength. (and betterc is just a part of it - and not one that particulary interests me).

Because D resources are rather contstrained, betterc gets more push back than it really should. But the main take away point I get from that vision statement, is a greater focus on increasing contributions - which is really what D needs more than anything (apart from a correct and complete language specification).