On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 02:56:14 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> .....

and btw. the next time you disagree with something someone has said, instead of attacking them personally, you could try "Wow", or "Ok".

Try it next time..it's actually easy and requires much less typing.

https
...

youtu.be/Lo6Q2vB9AAg?t=1460

How do you insert a link in these posts anyway?

On Wednesday, 21 November 2018 at 14:38:07 UTC, Chris wrote:
> 
> I watched the whole keynote. Well, to begin with it's still a very young language (not 18+ years old) and keeps getting better and better. Things that were a bit tricky just recently are now much easier and part and parcel of the language. It shows that they listen to their user base and make things as easy as possible. In many ways it's already miles ahead of D in terms of what you need as a programmer to get things done fast, e.g. tooling, interop, multi-platform, handling of deprecations etc. There are useful features (I already knew from D) that make life easier (e.g. lambdas).

Life isn't a zero-sum competition.  It's good for D if other emerging languages flourish.  Its bad for D if people worry about what others might be doing rather than thinking about how to make D the best language it can be.


> And as for meta-programming (I knew this would come up ;)), I don't really miss it / use it anymore. There was only one case where I said it would have been nice, but it wasn't _really_ necessary (it was just an old D habit, really). In fact, meta-programming in D can cause a lot of unnecessary headaches (cryptic compiler warnings galore, code breakage) and stall the whole development process unnecessarily - and often for very little extra value. It says a lot that Adam D. Ruppe stated that if you don't want your code to break, use non-idiomatic D. So what's the point of it then? It's just absurd.

Maybe D isn't the right language for you if you feel it doesn't bring anything special.  That's okay - it's a big wide world with plenty of room for there being different ways to be successful.

Everything has a cost to it.  Sometimes it's not worth the benefit.  But the dollar value of those things very much depends on your context and what you are trying to achieve.  One doesn't need to use metaprogramming if one doesn't want to, after all.  My own experience is that it has been quite useful.

> D could have been a real contender here (e.g. C interop) but instead of investing in a good infrastructure / tooling, cleaning up and stabilizing the language,

You know Mrs Thatcher once said there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women and families.  That's an overstatement - it's not one or the other, but society doesn't act as some mysterious social organism.  And it's the same with community.

Ive been investing a bit in tooling.  Dpp is pretty convenient for using C libraries and dstep also has improved by leaps and bounds.  Dpp has already saved me an incredible amount of time personally and it's made it possible to explore more options.  It's Atila's personal project that I sponsor in a modest way.

I open sourced a wrapper to create excel workbooks in D.  Also a D wrapper for reliable UDP - UDT.  It sped up file transfers between London and HK by between 100x and 350x.

Then there is autowrap, which was developed for in house use but I open sourced.  It now couldn't be easier to write D libraries for python, or excel addins and quite soon (it's there but the PR is undergoing code review in the open) for C# too.  Next project after that will be the other way around for C# so you can easily use C# code from D with no fuss once it's finished.

Manu has been working on including STL in D runtime.

And by the way I think dpp isn't so very far from being able to #include vector and more of C++ will follow in time.  So no idea when but in time there's a decent chance you can #include cpp libraries and find it just works in many cases and in others it's minimal work.

Based on a suggestion from Dmitry Olshansky I was playing around with graal vm. Polyglot.h just works with dpp.  Some work to write a wrapper but you can easily compile D to Llvm bitcode and have it run on the JVM where the tracing jit will do its magic and you can quite easily talk to js, java, python, R via polyglot. If I make any progress with the wrapper I will open source it.

I give a little money to the D Foundation and it will increase in time.  Symmetry sponsored the first Symmetry Autumn of Code with a couple of quite ambitious projects - fork GC and http 2.

You're part of the D community I think.  What have you been contributing? I presume something, because otherwise why so frustrated that other people are not doing what you would like them to.

the community has
> turned D into a "feature laboratory" where ideas are discussed to death and really important issues are swept under the rug.

People say a lot of things on forums.  I think that's why lots of people don't bother and spend more time discussing pull requests.  Talk is cheap. Personally, I've not been unhappy with the direction things have moved in over the past few years.  Do you really not recall what things were like in 2014?

> Other new languages focus on tooling and interop from the very beginning as they realize that this is very important these days, more so than fancy features (that can be added later).

Its based around voluntary cooperation.  How do you propose to make people work on things they personally aren't interested in doing?

If IDEs are that important to you, it might not be the right choice - I don't know.  I have the impression things keep getting better there but I personally don't use an IDE so I wouldn't know.  People I work with don't seem miserable about VS support.  It's not one of the things I have heard anyone grumble about.

If they are important to you, what steps did you personally take to move the world just a little in the direction you wish it to go?  I'm presuming you did something otherwise its funny to grumble.

What more would you reasonably like others (for example me) to do on interop?  (the big thing is the improvement in cpp interop, especially mangling).  It also does not seem to me like theres a dramatic amount to do - cpp will get there in time.  C is easy.  Python and Excel are done.  C# libraries in D is done first draft and the reverse will follow.  Jni isn't hard and polyglot is even easier and maybe will be made as easy as anything can be in time.  Honestly, what's missing?  Nodejs?! Julia? (at least Julia.h just works with dpp)

> Then, of course, the inevitable "X doesn't have feature Y, but D does! That's why X sucks." Only: are all these super features indispensable for production?

I am surprised you think the benefit of D is a matter of ticking of features.  I was just explaining to a colleague who was intrigued enough to take Andrei's book home that truly D brings nothing new, if you look at it from a tick box point of view.  Don't even bother trying if you're going to think of it that way.

But actually D does bring something quite unique and whilst it may not exactly be Christopher Alexander's quality without a name, it does relate to that.  In his paper on harmony - seeking computations (which is what characterizes life, a contrast with the deadness of mere emergence) he discusses a little experiment in which he shows the learnt inability of his Radcliffe students to notice patterns that really did exist but required a gestalt conception and couldn't be appreciated from considering the parts.

So it's my personal view that if D brings something valuable, you really shouldn't expect it to be a matter of this feature or that. It's what it's like working on a project over time in D and what it's like brings pretty valuable commercial benefits. I speak of my own experience but what I have heard from Liran at Weka is consonant with that.

Plasticity is something pretty valuable if you are in a business where intrinsically requirements evolve and can in any case never be sufficiently fully understood upfront.  Readability and expressiveness too.  That the deeper conceptual understanding of what plasticity is has yet to be understood does not mean its not something very real and important.  I think it has to do with certain ideas from Christopher Alexander, Goethe and others, but I'm still figuring that out.

> why hasn't D got backing from big players yet?

Because it's solving different problems from the ones they have.  Since at least in the US more than 100% of jobs are created by small and medium sized businesses, and since big tech have plenty of choices that solve their problems, then my personal view is that its a wonderful thing that D isn't backed by big tech.  I'm not even talking about potential impact on funding if the end of the bubble in despair weighs on the sector that people could believe in amidst despair and we see a rotation of capital into other sectors something that could weigh on funding generally.


 Because of the community's elitist and parochial
> mindset and the overall lack of consistency.

What did you personally do to make things less parochial and more consistent?

And btw parochial??  My own experience hiring D programmers from the community (two of them I met at the first meetup I went to) has been that one of the biggest benefits has been an opening up of the group to different ideas.  There are so many more varied and different discussions today than before.  That's a consequence of hiring people from the D community.

If by the community you meant people who post on the forum then you are making an identification error.  They are by no means the same thing.

> Joakim, you have done some great work as regards Android / iOS
Indeed.

> and I believe we are on the same page here. But see that the D Foundation didn't pick up on it and say "Let's take this and create some sound tooling for ARM cross-compilation."

You remind me of conversations with senior guy from an investment bank being on the hedge fund side.  You should do this or do that.  Well maybe, but how do you think I ought to make it happen in the context I am in.  Its a small company with only 140 odd people.  How is one to execute because a grand strategic plan by itself won't change a thing.


You seem to be assuming the D Foundation has not just a gazillion dollars but a big staff to go with it.  This isn't the case, I think.  It wasn't set up long ago and it's just beginning to start to get going.  It's awfully hard creating something from nothing (and it takes ages before you see results since it's an S curve) though of course its easy to give helpful advice.

But talk is cheap and it really doesn't change much.

If you would like to change the world, you know it's really up to you.  It's pretty easy to make an impact.  But to my eyes it's reminiscent of the behaviour of a spoilt child to insist others do things unless they are also doing what they can given their situation to help.

Are you?

And by the way my personal experience is that the small contributions I have made or that have been made commercially have been some of the highest return investments for me of the past decade.  Yet I was never really thinking too much about the roi, just making sure if I spent a modest amount of someone else's money I was acting as a good steward of it.

It's a stunning arbitrage to contribute to the community from where I sit.  That won't be true of everyone because the context is different.  But it might be true of more people than realise.

On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 03:06:17 UTC, NoMoreBugs wrote:
> On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 02:56:14 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>> And most likely your attitude will lead to polite engagement to the extent you say something insightful or interesting but to the extent you are just insisting the world adapt itself to what you personally want, the most likely ultimate consequence in time is that people politely ignore you.
>
> I just expressed an opinion. That's all I did.
>
> You are turning this into an completely *absurd* discussion *about me*.
>
> Lay off!

I didn't insult you or attack you, but simply observed that your means weren't suited to your seeming ends and explained why.  It's really your choice as to what to make of one perspective on the effectiveness of your behaviour.

On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 04:18:25 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>
> I didn't insult you or attack you, but simply observed that your means weren't suited to your seeming ends and explained why.  It's really your choice as to what to make of one perspective on the effectiveness of your behavior.

Your posts (which are there for anyone to read) sought to undermine an opinion that I expressed, by explicitly encouraging others who read that opinion to not take it seriously, and to just ignore it, simply on the basis of whether or not I was really part of the 'D community' and one of the 'committed users of D'.

If that is not a personal attack, what is?

And is that really the threshold for stating an opinion on these forums?

As I said, next time, you can save yourself a lot of typing, and just type "Wow".

In the 2 weeks so far, I've been accused (by a select few - always the same few though) of being a 'non-contributor', of misrepresenting facts, and being a socket puppet.

Welcome to the D forum.

On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 04:40:37 UTC, NoMoreBugs wrote:

> In the 2 weeks so far, I've been accused (by a select few - always the same few though) of being a 'non-contributor', of misrepresenting facts, and being a socket puppet.

- Honey, be careful. They say on the news there's a lunatic speeding in the wrong lane.
- A lunatic?!? There's loads of them!..

On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 04:40:37 UTC, NoMoreBugs wrote:
> On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 04:18:25 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>>
>> I didn't insult you or attack you, but simply observed that your means weren't suited to your seeming ends and explained why.  It's really your choice as to what to make of one perspective on the effectiveness of your behavior.
>
> Your posts (which are there for anyone to read) sought to undermine an opinion that I expressed, by explicitly encouraging others who read that opinion to not take it seriously, and to just ignore it, simply on the basis of whether or not I was really part of the 'D community' and one of the 'committed users of D'.
>
> If that is not a personal attack, what is?
>
> And is that really the threshold for stating an opinion on these forums?
>
> As I said, next time, you can save yourself a lot of typing, and just type "Wow".
>
> In the 2 weeks so far, I've been accused (by a select few - always the same few though) of being a 'non-contributor', of misrepresenting facts, and being a socket puppet.
>
> Welcome to the D forum.

I'm sorry this has been your introduction and perception of the D forums, and I suppose you deserve a better explanation of some of the initial hostilities you may have faced.

We have recently had someone who has expressed some ... rather strong opinions ... about the ideals of encapsulation of the class vis-à-vis the module, who was posting under multiple pseudonyms and impersonating others and generally acting in a manner the community deemed inappropriate. After a few weeks you start posting on this forum (IIRC) expressing some similar opinions (although not as strongly and not belligerently) and I presume that others on the forums thought you were "that guy" again (I did and I'm pretty sure Neia thinks you are as well, hence the "4-5 aliases").

It is now clear to me that you are not (because you are saying things that are sensible!) although you are getting a bit more worked up than I think you should (not that its less than par for this forum unfortunately...) and I would encourage you to take a less personal attitude to the response of others as they are (mostly) trying to help.

Laeeth's responses are certainly not meant to come across as condescending he just has a slightly different view of the world (being in finance and all) and are usually has quite interesting viewpoints and things to say.

On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 04:40:37 UTC, NoMoreBugs wrote:
> On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 04:18:25 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>>
>> I didn't insult you or attack you, but simply observed that your means weren't suited to your seeming ends and explained why.  It's really your choice as to what to make of one perspective on the effectiveness of your behavior.
>
> Your posts (which are there for anyone to read) sought to undermine an opinion that I expressed, by explicitly encouraging others who read that opinion to not take it seriously, and to just ignore it, simply on the basis of whether or not I was really part of the 'D community' and one of the 'committed users of D'.
>
> If that is not a personal attack, what is?

That's not what he did. He commented on what you said, he didn't personally attack you.


> And is that really the threshold for stating an opinion on these forums?

You can say what you want no problem. But if you want people to listen to you then usually you have to earn that, it's normal human behaviour. We put more and less value on what people say for a variety of reasons.


> As I said, next time, you can save yourself a lot of typing, and just type "Wow".

Laeeth is a nice guy, he tries to politely engage with newbies and ease them into a more broad minded understanding of how things are around here (by here I mean the cosmos). I think he's wasting his time but he's a nice guy so he keeps trying.


> In the 2 weeks so far, I've been accused (by a select few - always the same few though) of being a 'non-contributor', of misrepresenting facts, and being a socket puppet.

You are a non contributor.
You have misrepresented things (at the least Laeeth's last post)
You might be a sock puppet. I am, although Im a sock puppet of a sock puppet of a sock puppet. In fact it's socks all the way down man!


> Welcome to the D forum.

Welcome to the internet dude. Chill out, stop taking everything personally. And get to grips with the fact that D is a community effort, most people have their own furrow to plough, there aint really anyone here who's job it is to tuck the newbies in at night.

Also you have to accept that like who the fuck are you? i mean really, you pop up, weird name, anonymous, easily offended (like how old are you?), cant handle people disagreeing with you, and you still expect people to value your opinion in spite of all that?

Look mate most people will ignore you, some of the nice guys will try to be nice to you, some of the bored loonies will poke you to get a reaction.. (wait thats me!), but at the end of the day wtf do you expect?

On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 04:07:32 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:

[snip]

So I see, for you D is some sort of an esoteric group therapy.

> What did you personally do to make things less parochial and more consistent?

Yawn. Same strategy again: "Contribute or shut up!". Groundhog Day.

> It's pretty easy to make an impact.

It's actually not. Not in D.

> But to my eyes it's reminiscent of the behaviour of a spoilt child to insist others do
> things unless they are also doing what they can given their situation to help.

Again, condescension. Using a posh word ("reminiscent") and asking a cowardly question at the end ("Are you?") to make it look as if it were not a personal attack! Jesus! To be honest, I've used D for years and promoted it among people I know. I've written loads of software in D that is being used by others. I think that could also be seen as a contribution. And if I mention / request certain things that are common in other languages or I see that certain things are being neglected, of course, I am _the ungrateful child_ or I don't understand how the universe works or both.

My sarcasm is a reaction to the fact that I (and others) usually get no reaction regarding the points we make, only derision, nitpicking and a sermon about the general philosophy of D and that only the high priests really understand it.

> You seem to be assuming the D Foundation has not just a gazillion dollars but a big staff to
> go with it.  This isn't the case, I think.  It wasn't set up long ago and it's just beginning to start to get going.  It's awfully hard creating something from nothing (and it takes ages before you see results since it's an S curve) though of course its easy to give helpful advice.

The thing is that - as you mentioned yourself - there's loads of stuff out there already: Dpp, DStep, Joakims ARM stuff, Polyglot.h etc. Is it so unreasonable to expect the D Foundation to focus on collecting all the brilliant work that's been done by volunteers so far (fair play to them!) and package it as a nice product that can be extended as needed? That'd be a killer package and a good selling point for D. It's only common sense.

The D Foundation initially gave me hope that something like that would happen, and then you could get medium to big players on board (what's a million dollars to IBM or the like?) However, it got worse than before. While the development of D used to be a bit chaotic it has now become an autocratic chaos. The focus has shifted from improving D as a language (including tooling, packaging etc) to obsessing over the pet feature of the day. It's more of a hobby project now than ever before. And mind you, the D Foundation is young, but D is 18+ years old.

But hey, that's all right, if that's what the D leadership wants, fine. But stop pretending that D is a useful language people should use in the real world.

On 22/11/2018 10:44 PM, Dave Jones wrote:
> Welcome to the internet dude. Chill out, stop taking everything personally. And get to grips with the fact that D is a community effort, most people have their own furrow to plough, there aint really anyone here who's job it is to tuck the newbies in at night.
> 
> Also you have to accept that like who the fuck are you? i mean really, you pop up, weird name, anonymous, easily offended (like how old are you?), cant handle people disagreeing with you, and you still expect people to value your opinion in spite of all that?
> 
> Look mate most people will ignore you, some of the nice guys will try to be nice to you, some of the bored loonies will poke you to get a reaction.. (wait thats me!), but at the end of the day wtf do you expect?

That is quite enough, no need to respond if you won't be civil in response.

On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 04:07:32 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:

[snip]

By the way, you keep mentioning that you use D for your own internal stuff, and as far as I can see a lot of companies that use D do the same. They have their own in-house ecosystem, and that's fine. Of course, for this kind of usage D might be OK (apart from the facepalm flaws it still has) - or any language for that matter.

However, a lot of IT companies (small, medium and big) also have to adapt to the market in terms of third party products like Android and iOS and other technologies (including those that do not yet exist). Once that's the case, D is one of the worst choices possible. Everything takes years, anything that is not directly related to (some specific features of) the language is treated as lowest priority, and a small or medium sized company may not be able "to roll its own" all the time, especially if everything is still raw and has a lot of loose ends as in the case of D. And you know what, customers don't care about your problems. They simply go somewhere else, if you can't deliver. So what you need is a language that provides adaptability out of the box. This is why a lot of new languages invest in exactly this and try to open as many "ports" as possible, to make the language as useful as possible. Only in this way they will be adopted by users. Your "cosmos" is D and your own company. But most other people have to cater for third party software as well and adapt to an ever changing market. I think this is a fact you're not really aware of. You can talk all you like about the cosmos and the universe, but all you see are your own needs for which D might be fine. But reality is different for other people.