On Thursday, January 04, 2018 10:27:37 H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 10:23:57AM +0000, Paolo Invernizzi via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > On Thursday, 4 January 2018 at 07:47:41 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > > [...]
> >
> > I'm missing Kenji...
>
> Me too. :-(  Does anybody know what happened to him? He just sortof dropped off the radar suddenly and I haven't been able to find out where he went or what happened to him since ~2 years ago.

I don't know the details, but I heard that he got annoyed when Andrei closed some of his PRs that were supposed to reformat the compiler's code to match what it had been before it was automatically converted to D (since apparently, the automatic conversion mucked with some of the formatting). I gather than Keji preferred the way that the code had been formatted before, whereas Andrei thought that PRs that just changed formatting were a waste of time, but I don't know. There may have been other causes of friction involved, or something else may have happened in his personal life, but it sounded like Kenji got annoyed/frustrated over what was happening with his PRs for dmd and left.

Either way, he was a strong contributor, and it's a shame that he's gone now. Plenty of other good contributors have basically fallen off the map as well, but his loss is probably more strongly felt than most given that he was able to do an insane amount of work, and he was one of the core contributors to the compiler.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 12:06:14PM -0700, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, January 04, 2018 10:27:37 H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 10:23:57AM +0000, Paolo Invernizzi via
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> > > I'm missing Kenji...
> >
> > Me too. :-(  Does anybody know what happened to him? He just sortof dropped off the radar suddenly and I haven't been able to find out where he went or what happened to him since ~2 years ago.
> 
> I don't know the details, but I heard that he got annoyed when Andrei closed some of his PRs that were supposed to reformat the compiler's code to match what it had been before it was automatically converted to D (since apparently, the automatic conversion mucked with some of the formatting). I gather than Keji preferred the way that the code had been formatted before, whereas Andrei thought that PRs that just changed formatting were a waste of time, but I don't know. There may have been other causes of friction involved, or something else may have happened in his personal life, but it sounded like Kenji got annoyed/frustrated over what was happening with his PRs for dmd and left.
> 
> Either way, he was a strong contributor, and it's a shame that he's gone now. Plenty of other good contributors have basically fallen off the map as well, but his loss is probably more strongly felt than most given that he was able to do an insane amount of work, and he was one of the core contributors to the compiler.
[...]

Yeah, his absence is sorely felt, even today.  He used to be one of the defining figures of D, esp. dmd, and I have good memories of what I call his "zero-day bug fixes" -- those of you who were around then would understand what I mean. :-P  I hope we can learn from this experience so that we don't lose more strong contributors in the future.

Another person I miss is bearophile... while AFAIK he did not actually contribute code, he was very active in submitting bugs and enhancement requests, many of which led to significant improvements to D.  He also just dropped off the radar without any sign of what happened.  Did he get frustrated with D and went to Rust or Go or something?


T

-- 
Computerese Irregular Verb Conjugation: I have preferences.  You have biases.  He/She has prejudices. -- Gene Wirchenko

On 1/4/18 2:21 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Another person I miss is bearophile... while AFAIK he did not actually
> contribute code, he was very active in submitting bugs and enhancement
> requests, many of which led to significant improvements to D.  He also
> just dropped off the radar without any sign of what happened.  Did he
> get frustrated with D and went to Rust or Go or something?

bearophile went to Rust I think.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6d25mg/faster_command_line_tools_in_d/di01i54/

-Steve

On Thursday, 4 January 2018 at 20:05:30 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On 1/4/18 2:21 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> Another person I miss is bearophile... while AFAIK he did not actually
>> contribute code, he was very active in submitting bugs and enhancement
>> requests, many of which led to significant improvements to D.  He also
>> just dropped off the radar without any sign of what happened.  Did he
>> get frustrated with D and went to Rust or Go or something?
>
> bearophile went to Rust I think.
>
> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6d25mg/faster_command_line_tools_in_d/di01i54/
>
> -Steve

Ooohhhh!

I was unaware he is an Italian like me...
I'm wondering if he is living not too far from Milano...

/P

On Thursday, 4 January 2018 at 19:06:14 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Thursday, January 04, 2018 10:27:37 H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 10:23:57AM +0000, Paolo Invernizzi via
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> > On Thursday, 4 January 2018 at 07:47:41 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> > > [...]
>> >
>> > I'm missing Kenji...
>>
>> Me too. :-(  Does anybody know what happened to him? He just sortof dropped off the radar suddenly and I haven't been able to find out where he went or what happened to him since ~2 years ago.
>
> I don't know the details, but I heard that he got annoyed when Andrei closed some of his PRs that were supposed to reformat the compiler's code to match what it had been before it was automatically converted to D (since apparently, the automatic conversion mucked with some of the formatting). I gather than Keji preferred the way that the code had been formatted before, whereas Andrei thought that PRs that just changed formatting were a waste of time, but I don't know. There may have been other causes of friction involved, or something else may have happened in his personal life, but it sounded like Kenji got annoyed/frustrated over what was happening with his PRs for dmd and left.
>
> Either way, he was a strong contributor, and it's a shame that he's gone now. Plenty of other good contributors have basically fallen off the map as well, but his loss is probably more strongly felt than most given that he was able to do an insane amount of work, and he was one of the core contributors to the compiler.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

I remember very well that event... along with others.

Andrei recently posted that he is following less the forums as he prefer to invest his time in a different way ...
Adam suggested Walter to follow the 'learn' forum to have a cleaner idea about common problems in the language usage, and Walter replied that he prefers to invest his time digging  and solving Bugzilla issues...

There's nothing wrong with that, and it's reasonable also.

But it's a sign, IMHO, of something wrong with the management of the 'human factors' in dlang-land.

/Paolo

On 1/5/18 6:04 AM, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
> Andrei recently posted that he is following less the forums as he prefer to invest his time in a different way ...
> Adam suggested Walter to follow the 'learn' forum to have a cleaner idea about common problems in the language usage, and Walter replied that he prefers to invest his time digging  and solving Bugzilla issues...
>
> There's nothing wrong with that, and it's reasonable also.
> 
> But it's a sign, IMHO, of something wrong with the management of the 'human factors' in dlang-land.

Thanks for writing. We are following the forums, just that we are trying to convert idle debates into actual impact. Michael Parker is very helpful as well. My perception is we are in touch with the community, though definitely things could be improved. -- Andrei

On Friday, 5 January 2018 at 13:02:20 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 1/5/18 6:04 AM, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
>> Andrei recently posted that he is following less the forums as he prefer to invest his time in a different way ...
>> Adam suggested Walter to follow the 'learn' forum to have a cleaner idea about common problems in the language usage, and Walter replied that he prefers to invest his time digging  and solving Bugzilla issues...
>>
>> There's nothing wrong with that, and it's reasonable also.
>> 
>> But it's a sign, IMHO, of something wrong with the management of the 'human factors' in dlang-land.
>
> Thanks for writing. We are following the forums, just that we are trying to convert idle debates into actual impact. Michael Parker is very helpful as well. My perception is we are in touch with the community, though definitely things could be improved. -- Andrei

Thanks Andrei, glad to hear that, and you are right about Michael.
Laeeth is also doing a very positive work in keep things focused in discussions.

Having just read that Walter is working on coloured error messages, as a contribution to the community I'm quoting what I've emailed to you quite long ago.
Let's see if we can do something about this.

"Regarding what I’ve written as an advice, I’m not an engineer, I’m coming for school of economics (but I’m a programmer, too), but hey, my fast advice are:

- be proud: commercials are appreciating that the D core team is encouraging companies to submit their needs. Not only Industry proven, Industry Friendly and supportive, should be big on the DLang site, and it’s already happening.

- be selective: their needs in the _actual_ D usage; they are taking a risk and investing in D, feedback coming from companies using D daily with large codebase, must have a bigger weight than other feedback.

- be open: just transform that feedback, with the right omissis if necessary, in something public.

- be addicted to facts: try to separate opinions from facts on the previous point, digging from requests for a feature to the problem that they are trying to solve with the requested feature.

- be predictive: before taking a choice on the language, make a public statement about what you are expecting as a result in the use of D, and how it will be measured in the future: a LOT of things are measurable.

- be quantitative: your download statistics are a good start, try to collect from commercials statistics about the length of the codebase, the compilation times, how many are using a feature (C++ integration, allocators, scope when polished).

- be fact driven: analyse your own predictions about metrics with what you are as results from measuring, and iterate on the next decisions (also) based on that."

/Paolo

On Friday, 5 January 2018 at 13:22:00 UTC, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
>
> - be quantitative: your download statistics are a good start, try to collect from commercials statistics about the length of the codebase, the compilation times, how many are using a feature (C++ integration, allocators, scope when polished).
>
> - be fact driven: analyse your own predictions about metrics with what you are as results from measuring, and iterate on the next decisions (also) based on that."
>
> /Paolo

Yes, quantitative information is always good for making sense of things ;-)

I like how linux kernel development do their reports .. not that D is should be compared to the scale of the linux kernel development effort .. but still .. numbers, tables, graphs .. they provide a nice high level overview .. that you can't get when you're stuck in the trenches.

btw. interesting fact.. in a 10 year period, the linux kernel has gone from 8 million lines, to almost 25 million lines. If they average 0.5 defect per KLOC (a very convervative estimate), than means that 90 percent of the public cloud workload, 62 percent of the embedded market share, 99 percent of the supercomputer market share, 82 percent of the world’s smartphones, and nine of the top ten public clouds... are all running a operating system kernel with around 12500+ bugs in it.

Jeepers!

On 1/5/2018 3:04 AM, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
> Adam suggested Walter to follow the 'learn' forum to have a cleaner idea about common problems in the language usage, and Walter replied that he prefers to invest his time digging  and solving Bugzilla issues...

I could easily spend 30 hours per day just reading the n.g. Or 30 hours per day just reviewing PRs. Or ...

I have to manage my time.

On Friday, 5 January 2018 at 22:45:15 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> I could easily spend 30 hours per day just reading the n.g.

Learn threads tend to be quite short. Just skim the first post in a thread to see what people talk about. It takes mere minutes, spread out over the day.