On 2011-12-14 09:09, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 12/14/11 1:44 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> On 2011-12-14 00:03, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> On 12/13/11 3:00 PM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>>>> I think it's selfish to decide for the hole community.
>>>
>>> Well the word "selfish" is not appropriate here because the decision
>>> does not bring me any benefit. Perhaps you meant "arrogant" or
>>> "conceited".
>>
>> I don't know that you're trying to achieve but it seems you trying to
>> erase D1 from the history, pretending it never happened.
>
> How does announcing cease of support (not retiring the product) more
> than one year in advance equate with attempting to erase a product from
> history?

That's the attitude you seem to have sometimes. Saying that D1 isn't usable because it lacks features. D1 is usable, something I couldn't say as much about D2.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 2011-12-14 09:11, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 12/14/11 1:42 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>>> I understand how you might see things that way, but please trust me on
>>> this one. It is the right thing do do, and the short-term difficulty
>>> will be greatly rewarded in the long run.
>>
>> Probably, but as with the rest of the development of D2 everything
>> happen to fast. TDPL was released without a compiler backing up all the
>> features. Also no one knows what the correct behavior of a features is,
>> what's in TDPL, what's in the compiler or what's in the spec.
>
> That would have been a great point if the announcement used the date of
> December 31 of this year.
>
> Andrei

It's still too soon because no one will know in what sate D2 is from a year from now.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 2011-12-14 09:13, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 12/14/11 1:35 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> No. It's not so much about the result (because I know basically everyone
>> would vote to discontinue the D1 support), it's more about the attitude
>> and the way it's handled.
>
> How would you have handled the situation if you were in our place?

I would first wait longer, until D2 and Phobos is in a more usable state. Then I would first bring up the ideas you and Walter have to the community before anything is decided.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 2011-12-14 09:30, Don wrote:
> On 14.12.2011 05:37, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 12/13/11 10:12 PM, Don wrote:
>>> On 13.12.2011 17:00, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>>> On 12/13/11 7:52 AM, Don wrote:
>>>>> On 10.12.2011 22:19, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>>>>> In order to increase focus and unity in the language, we are
>>>>>> discontinuing support for D1 on December 31, 2012. That's more than
>>>>>> one
>>>>>> year away, which gives enough time to D1 users to migrate libraries
>>>>>> and
>>>>>> applications to D2.
>>>>>
>>>>> I thought we had moved away from these kinds of unilateral decisions.
>>>>> I strongly oppose this decision. In particlar, I find the lack of
>>>>> community consulatation deplorable.
>>>>
>>>> Apologies for this being so sudden. This was deliberate as there would
>>>> have been no way to achieve consensus in the matter. People prefer
>>>> having choices and postponement options, and are generous with others'
>>>> time.
>>>>
>>>> Allow me to recap the reasons why I think this is a necessary move.
>>>>
>>>> 1. We can't serve two masters. Working on two languages at the same
>>>> time
>>>> was non-committal and artificially sustained a rift in the community.
>>>
>>> The rift was created and sustained by unilateral statements like this
>>> one. Abandoning half the community doesn't help.
>>
>> There is no abandonment. Also, where is that 50/50 estimate from? Just
>> curious.
>
>
> The D2 community is definitely bigger than the D1 community. But how
> much more?
>
> It's hard to be sure, but the Tango users used to be 75% of the
> community, based on a few polls that were held, but they never had much
> representation on the ng. I guess between half and 2/3 are gone now.
> I don't think the entire D community is as big as it was back then
> (based on number of public repositories).
> Additionally, the number of contributors, and level of activity, in
> Tango, was higher than Phobos has ever had.
>
>>>> It also diffused our focus, delayed us to an ever-increasing extent,
>>>
>>> What on earth gives you that idea? The only resources involved are some
>>> fraction of Walter's time, which is obviously an important resource, but
>>> nobody other than Walter is affected.
>>
>> Walter told me so, and Walter is the single most important bottleneck.
>
> So "us" means Walter?
>
>>> You're seriously misrepresenting
>>> the situation.
>>
>> What is an accurate representation of the situation, and what evidence
>> is there to back that up?
>
> This is an issue of Walter's time, and nothing more. I think the
> evidence for that is clear -- who else is spending time on D1?
>
> Important thing to notice: GDC and LDC also have D1 compilers. Does this
> decision apply to them?
>
>>> I spend some time on fixing D1 bugs, but that won't change, see below.
>>>
>>>> and
>>>> sent the wrong message out that we're lacking confidence of what our
>>>> core thrust is, so we're trying to sort of please everyone. ("Here's
>>>> our
>>>> flagship language! If you don't like it, well, we have another one.")
>>>
>>> This is a silly and offensive statement. Most languages are in this
>>> situation. Look at Python2 vs Python3, Perl6 vs Perl5.
>>
>> I wonder who would be offended by that.
>
> Other than me? Well, I think the Python guys would be offended if you
> said it of them.
>
>>>> 2. The deadline is more than a year away. This is a long time, enough
>>>> for us to make D2 compelling, and also for interested people to
>>>> migrate.
>>>
>>> No, it's an exceedingly short timeframe.
>>
>> Other vendors give similar time scale for much larger migrations.
>
> Only when the migration is to a mature product.
>
>>
>>> What gives you the idea that
>>> nobody is using D1?
>>
>> There is not one sentence in my message claiming nobody is using D1.
>
> Ok, I can't make sense of it otherwise.
>
>> Don, it is you who is misrepresenting the situation, and repeatedly. I
>> understand you find this frustrating, but please, let's have a
>> constructive dialog.
>>
>>> Have you thought about what would convince them to
>>> switch to D2, and what would be required for them to do it?
>>
>> I think the most important aspect for them would be completion of
>> Tango's port to D2. The recent progress in the matter is encouraging. If
>> the D1 community is sizable, resourceful, and interested, I believe that
>> to be within the realm of possibility.
>
> At the present time, do they actually desire to move to D2? If not, why
> not? And the big one: are they confident that D2 is sufficiently stable?
>
>>> I suspect you don't know much about the D1 community. (Note that only a
>>> small fraction of D users have ever used the newsgroup, and it's mostly
>>> people with an interest in language design. They are not
>>> representative).
>>>
>>> I can already say with certainty that I will still be using D1 in 2013.
>>
>> That's great. The decision does not make it impossible or even
>> particularly difficult for D1 users to continue using D1. Since there
>> were near zero bug reports on D1,
>
> There are 400 open bugzilla D1 + common D1/D2 compiler bugs in Bugzilla,
> including nearly all of the heavily voted bugs. D1 is very much more
> stable than D2 (D2 has 800 open bugs), so there are far fewer bug reports.
>
> If you mean, there were no bug reports on the beta, that's not
> suprising, there are no D1 Phobos changes, which is where regressions
> mostly show up.
>
> they can be assumed to be content with
>> the quality of the compiler. Really I don't see the gist of the
>> complaint. This is not abandonment.
>
> You, Andrei, are personally making a decision which affects the entire
> community. I'm actually a bit shocked that you've done this.
>
> Especially since there was a big public discussion on the D internals
> newsgroup (Nov 10) about reducing the pressure of Walter's time.
> ---------
> Kenji:
>  > Today only Walter improvements D1 branch. Almost dmd pulls only
>  > consider D2 branch. Should we add D1 patch at the same time?
>
> Walter:
> Merging with D1 hasn't been too difficult; I use a program called "meld"
> which makes it a snap.
> ...
>
> It usually takes a couple hours to merge a patch, if things go smoothly.
> Most of that is running the test suite. Some more time is spent updating
> the changelog and bugzilla.
> ----
> So, didn't sound then as though D1 was a big issue. Yet a month later
> you announce you've made a private decision about axing D1.
> Feels exactly like a military coup.

I completely agree with Don.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 2011-12-14 10:08, Long Chang wrote:
> I use dwt and tango for some project recent.

Cool to here that's someone is using DWT.

> Before dwt2 and minid and other cool project is ready for d2, I will
> still need  D1.

Exactly and see, the D1 users start to pop up.

> On 13 December 2011 21:52, Don<nospam@nospam.com>  wrote:
>> On 10.12.2011 22:19, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>>
>>> In order to increase focus and unity in the language, we are
>>> discontinuing support for D1 on December 31, 2012. That's more than one
>>> year away, which gives enough time to D1 users to migrate libraries and
>>> applications to D2.
>>
>>
>> I thought we had moved away from these kinds of unilateral decisions.
>> I strongly oppose this decision. In particlar, I find the lack of community
>> consulatation deplorable.


-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 12/14/2011 1:06 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> But there are a few features I would
> really like before the development on D1 ends. I'm thinking particular on
> dynamic libraries.

I am too. Shared library support is bubbling up on the priority list :-)

On Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:45:51 +0100
Jacob Carlborg <doob@me.com> wrote:

> The few times I've contributed to the compiler I've sent a patch or a pull request and the end result is that nothing happens. If I'm lucky I get a few comments, I answer them and then nothing.

Heh, then fork it. ;)

Well, the situation is that resources in D are still not everwhelming and every bit spent on D1, means less time for D2.

Moreover, D2 brings features which makes embracing D much more compelling. OK, I was not here in the time of D1, but seeing D1's feature list, I wouldn't think it is so special to invest in learning & using it.

Another thing is I believe that Walter didn't delve in designing new language in order to be used for small hobby projects.

Can you give me a list of some successful open-source projects written in D1 and/or some proprietary ones?

Is there demand of paying support for D1?

If not and if Walter prefers spending time on D2, I really do not understand why there is so much whining about it.

If D1 wants to keep it, they're, afaict, free to do it.

Is there anyone who can prevent Walter to write a post saying: "I'm fed up with D community being busy with faultfinding all the time, not being grateful for the time & effort I'm putting into it, so from TODAY I'm quitting all the work on D1 & D2 and will focus on designing new X language?"

I remember him from Zortech C++ compiler which was my *first* commercial package I bought and remembering the set of manuals coming along in a greyish hard box, I was thrilled with all support I got...same with updates.

Now he is working for free...


Sincerely,
Gour


-- 
The spirit soul bewildered by the influence of false ego thinks himself the doer of activities that are in actuality carried out by the three modes of material nature.

http://atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: 52B5C810

On 12/14/11 2:30 AM, Don wrote:
> On 14.12.2011 05:37, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> There is no abandonment. Also, where is that 50/50 estimate from? Just
>> curious.
>
> The D2 community is definitely bigger than the D1 community. But how
> much more?

I presume it's quite a bit larger. But then both are small, and we're interested in the potential and the rate of adoption.

> It's hard to be sure, but the Tango users used to be 75% of the
> community, based on a few polls that were held, but they never had much
> representation on the ng. I guess between half and 2/3 are gone now.

That seems a reasonable assessment. Possibly even more left.

> I don't think the entire D community is as big as it was back then
> (based on number of public repositories).

That is also entirely possible.

> Additionally, the number of contributors, and level of activity, in
> Tango, was higher than Phobos has ever had.

Agreed.

But this is all missing the mark - why would we cry over spilled milk. The point is assessing the state of affairs the minute before the announcement. How active was Tango? How active were the Tango forums? Where were other forums of the D1 community? In this day and age, I'd be hard-pressed to think of an active programming language community that has no online presence whatsoever.

To add to that, there was no trickle of bug reports or pull requests for D1, although clearly D1 does have its bugs and issues. I haven't followed Tango closely, but if D1 had a large active community, Tango would receive a lot of attention from its users as it's the de facto standard library for D1. Yet the last post (http://www.dsource.org/projects/tango/forums/topic/903) dates from March 30. The intervals between changes to the trunk (http://www.dsource.org/projects/tango/changeset/5691/) are measured in months.

I hope you'll agree that one would be hard-pressed to infer from the evidence there is that there's a large, active, and thriving D1 community.

>>>> It also diffused our focus, delayed us to an ever-increasing extent,
>>>
>>> What on earth gives you that idea? The only resources involved are some
>>> fraction of Walter's time, which is obviously an important resource, but
>>> nobody other than Walter is affected.
>>
>> Walter told me so, and Walter is the single most important bottleneck.
>
> So "us" means Walter?

A delay originated by Walter delays the entire community. So by "us" I meant the community.

>>> You're seriously misrepresenting
>>> the situation.
>>
>> What is an accurate representation of the situation, and what evidence
>> is there to back that up?
>
> This is an issue of Walter's time, and nothing more.

Walter said that he'd rather not spend that time anymore.

> I think the
> evidence for that is clear -- who else is spending time on D1?

As I mentioned, the larger issue is the message we're sending out. We can't serve two masters, and we need to focus and specialize our brand. Please trust me on this; in only a few short months I'm confident you will agree this will have been a good move.

> Important thing to notice: GDC and LDC also have D1 compilers. Does this
> decision apply to them?

No.

>>> I spend some time on fixing D1 bugs, but that won't change, see below.
>>>
>>>> and
>>>> sent the wrong message out that we're lacking confidence of what our
>>>> core thrust is, so we're trying to sort of please everyone. ("Here's
>>>> our
>>>> flagship language! If you don't like it, well, we have another one.")
>>>
>>> This is a silly and offensive statement. Most languages are in this
>>> situation. Look at Python2 vs Python3, Perl6 vs Perl5.
>>
>> I wonder who would be offended by that.
>
> Other than me? Well, I think the Python guys would be offended if you
> said it of them.
>
>>>> 2. The deadline is more than a year away. This is a long time, enough
>>>> for us to make D2 compelling, and also for interested people to
>>>> migrate.
>>>
>>> No, it's an exceedingly short timeframe.
>>
>> Other vendors give similar time scale for much larger migrations.
>
> Only when the migration is to a mature product.

Agreed. All things considered, one year seems to me a resonable time frame. It's reasonable of you to disagree. Time will tell whom of us was right.

>>> What gives you the idea that
>>> nobody is using D1?
>>
>> There is not one sentence in my message claiming nobody is using D1.
>
> Ok, I can't make sense of it otherwise.
>
>> Don, it is you who is misrepresenting the situation, and repeatedly. I
>> understand you find this frustrating, but please, let's have a
>> constructive dialog.
>>
>>> Have you thought about what would convince them to
>>> switch to D2, and what would be required for them to do it?
>>
>> I think the most important aspect for them would be completion of
>> Tango's port to D2. The recent progress in the matter is encouraging. If
>> the D1 community is sizable, resourceful, and interested, I believe that
>> to be within the realm of possibility.
>
> At the present time, do they actually desire to move to D2? If not, why
> not? And the big one: are they confident that D2 is sufficiently stable?

I don't know what they think. Based on the observations I outlined above, I can hypothesize (a) the interest to move to D2 is scant; (b) the main reason is Tango is not working with D2; and (c) I don't know and I don't think that's the gating factor (Tango is). I'll venture the opinion that the D1-like subset of D2 is as stable than D1.

>>> I suspect you don't know much about the D1 community. (Note that only a
>>> small fraction of D users have ever used the newsgroup, and it's mostly
>>> people with an interest in language design. They are not
>>> representative).
>>>
>>> I can already say with certainty that I will still be using D1 in 2013.
>>
>> That's great. The decision does not make it impossible or even
>> particularly difficult for D1 users to continue using D1. Since there
>> were near zero bug reports on D1,
>
> There are 400 open bugzilla D1 + common D1/D2 compiler bugs in Bugzilla,
> including nearly all of the heavily voted bugs. D1 is very much more
> stable than D2 (D2 has 800 open bugs), so there are far fewer bug reports.

More bug reports does not imply less stability because number of users also affects the numbers. Also, there is heavy community activity to fix D2 bugs but not D1 bugs. It's reasonable to assume there aren't many people waiting for some D1 bug to be fixed. They either found a workaround or left the language.

> If you mean, there were no bug reports on the beta, that's not
> suprising, there are no D1 Phobos changes, which is where regressions
> mostly show up.

I wasn't referring to this beta as much as the overall pattern of reporting D1 bugs, discussing them, and contributing fixes to them.

> they can be assumed to be content with
>> the quality of the compiler. Really I don't see the gist of the
>> complaint. This is not abandonment.
>
> You, Andrei, are personally making a decision which affects the entire
> community. I'm actually a bit shocked that you've done this.

Walter and I made this decision together. This is not a decision of the community because, again, people like to postpone, keep options open, and be generous with others' time. To give a counter-example, I asked for community input on the new website although I was advised against it. Indeed I've been racked over coals, but the ultimate result is a much better website than it would have otherwise been.

If I knew of your response, we would have made sure to pass it by you, and I apologize we didn't. (I assume the entire core team would be on board with the decision, and aside from you, my perception is that it is.) But if you have already enumerated the arguments you would have made prior to making the decision, I think you'd agree they wouldn't have been compelling.

> Especially since there was a big public discussion on the D internals
> newsgroup (Nov 10) about reducing the pressure of Walter's time.
> ---------
> Kenji:
>  > Today only Walter improvements D1 branch. Almost dmd pulls only
>  > consider D2 branch. Should we add D1 patch at the same time?
>
> Walter:
> Merging with D1 hasn't been too difficult; I use a program called "meld"
> which makes it a snap.
> ....
>
> It usually takes a couple hours to merge a patch, if things go smoothly.
> Most of that is running the test suite. Some more time is spent updating
> the changelog and bugzilla.
> ----
> So, didn't sound then as though D1 was a big issue. Yet a month later
> you announce you've made a private decision about axing D1.
> Feels exactly like a military coup.

Well I am as surprised about your surprise as you are about the fact itself. About this, I repeat that Walter's time is one component, but not the major one. We can assume it costs him zero time; still the decision to announce ceasing D1 support in one year is a good one. Please trust me on this one, and may D1's blood be on me if I made a mistake.


Andrei

On 12/14/11 2:55 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2011-12-14 08:56, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 12/13/2011 11:29 PM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>>> Then let me say: "I still use D1 for all my projects".
>>
>> I hear you. What can we do to make this work for you?
>
> I think it's too soon to discontinue the support for D1. I would hope
> that we could continue like this, having D1 in maintenance mode, for a
> while longer.

How long?

Andrei

On 12/14/2011 12:30 AM, Don wrote:
> So, didn't sound then as though D1 was a big issue. Yet a month later you
> announce you've made a private decision about axing D1.
> Feels exactly like a military coup.

Well, it wasn't one. The thing is, as I posted in this thread recently, there's little to no evidence of D1 interest - nobody responded to the beta, no posts about D1, no new bug reports about D1, no response to the new D1 releases (yes, Jacob just did a reply to it), etc.

I feel like I was supporting D1 in a vacuum. I've been thinking about ending support for it for some time because of that.

I don't know where the D1 community is, or even if it exists anymore.