July 23, 2019
On Tue, 2019-07-23 at 03:01 +0000, Exil via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> […]
> 
> The problem is who has control of these things. I've made pull requests to dub, they just sit around and nothing gets done. Very few people have access to actually enact change. Don't say stuff like "you have to do action yourself" cause it's not on me or anyone else. There's hundreds of pull requests for DMD and DUB combined. There's only so much people can do when pull requests sit idle for months/years, especially worse when there's no responding. When something somewhat default appears, no one on the D team is willing to do anything about it. They all look to Walter, and Walter is usually to busy doing something else so he never gets around to it. But yah, a very naive thing to say considering the current state of how things are managed with the project. God bless Seb for having enhanced permission status ^TM.

Go and Rust got this right from the very outset – make the standard library as small as possible and have everything else provided through user packages/crates. Go only got this partly right in that there was no central repository, just DVCS packages. Rust got this very right in that it has a central repository and Cargo can use DVCS crates and even local file crates. This creates a vibrant community with some competition (which has bad as well as good sides to it).

I am sure Dub can do for D most of the things Cargo does for Rust, but the crucial difference is Phobos in D vs std in Rust. Phobos is driven by the "batteries included" philosophy which is a philosophy past it's time. Python and C++ are also failing to come to terms with this.

What D needs is to rip everything out of Phobos that is not actually needed
for the compiler to compile code and put it into the Dub repository as
separate packages – this is what the Rust team did, and it was the right thing
to do.

If this means creating D v3, then that seems like a really good thing to do.

-- 
Russel.
===========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk



July 23, 2019
On Sun, 2019-07-21 at 22:08 +0000, Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d wrote: […]
> But I suppose the mobile market is intrinsically quite different from some other areas?  For some kinds of internal enterprise code one can't realistically just throw away the old code and write new code because there is quite a lot of fiddly domain knowledge embedded in that legacy code and the consequence-based calculus means that the bar to trusting tests to catch everything is quite high.  Probably a file system or kernel might have similar constraints for different reasons.

As I understand it, the major issue is that the JVM on Android is quite ancient and so is the version of Java that can be used. Kotlin brings modern programming techniques to the Android JVM as it is and so has a major advantage over using Java on that platform. In the Web server and desktop application world, most organisations are at least on JDK 8 if not JDK 11. So the version of Java is less ancient and so less at a disadvantage compared to Kotlin.

> And I do wonder if the impression one gets from tech media (social and otherwise) leads to a distorted perception of reality.  People from mobile, web etc have a much higher propensity to talk about their work than people in other kinds of enterprises, and yet the latter set is quite important, and I would guess in aggregate would hold much greater economic significance.
> 
[…]

True a lot of Android applications are constructed by big organisations, and done quietly, but the Android platform has a much larger number of small organisation and individuals who are very vocal compared to the server arena.

-- 
Russel.
===========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk



July 23, 2019
On Tuesday, 23 July 2019 at 00:47:09 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> On Monday, 22 July 2019 at 23:16:26 UTC, Margo wrote:
>> [...]
>
> Not everyone uses an IDE.  It's obviously an impediment to adoption in the games industry judging by what Manu says, but there are other industries besides games and in some places people don't use IDEs much at all.
>
> [...]


Thank you. I  appreciate this write up. I had been this forum about two years now. I like the D language, for me, it is the best language I have come across. I have a look into languages like Kotlin, Java, C#, C++, C, Go, Rust etc.

I know D has room for a lot of improvements and I see the various stakeholders are doing their best with the little resources available.




My major problem with D is the critical community. It is discouraging to cope with. This forum is too critical about D challenges and says little or nothing about the strength of D. Most of the post here is about why D cannot succeed or be used. The organizer should do something about such a post. Just Google Dlang and reads the comments about the language, you will be discouraged to go further. But most of the comments are not true as I start learning D. Dlang is a beautiful language that is easy to use.


I think the community should put out an article about D outline all the strength in a compelling way especially from proven industry users.
July 23, 2019
On 23/07/2019 10:31 PM, greatsam4sure wrote:
> I think the community should put out an article about D outline all the strength in a compelling way especially from proven industry users.

We have been doing that.
It has improved the responses on Reddit greatly towards our GC.
July 23, 2019
On Tuesday, 23 July 2019 at 10:15:52 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Tue, 2019-07-23 at 03:01 +0000, Exil via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> […]
>> 
>> The problem is who has control of these things. I've made pull requests to dub, they just sit around and nothing gets done. Very few people have access to actually enact change. Don't say stuff like "you have to do action yourself" cause it's not on me or anyone else. There's hundreds of pull requests for DMD and DUB combined. There's only so much people can do when pull requests sit idle for months/years, especially worse when there's no responding. When something somewhat default appears, no one on the D team is willing to do anything about it. They all look to Walter, and Walter is usually to busy doing something else so he never gets around to it. But yah, a very naive thing to say considering the current state of how things are managed with the project. God bless Seb for having enhanced permission status ^TM.
>
> Go and Rust got this right from the very outset – make the standard library as small as possible and have everything else provided through user packages/crates. Go only got this partly right in that there was no central repository, just DVCS packages. Rust got this very right in that it has a central repository and Cargo can use DVCS crates and even local file crates. This creates a vibrant community with some competition (which has bad as well as good sides to it).
>
> I am sure Dub can do for D most of the things Cargo does for Rust, but the crucial difference is Phobos in D vs std in Rust. Phobos is driven by the "batteries included" philosophy which is a philosophy past it's time. Python and C++ are also failing to come to terms with this.
>
> What D needs is to rip everything out of Phobos that is not actually needed
> for the compiler to compile code and put it into the Dub repository as
> separate packages – this is what the Rust team did, and it was the right thing
> to do.
>
> If this means creating D v3, then that seems like a really good thing to do.

It is a pleasure to have a standard library like Phobos. For most applications I do not have to use any additional dub packages. I do not have to care about licenses and whether it is still maintained tomorrow.

Today users can decide to use either Phobos functionality or to use dub packages providing same functionality. You have the choice today.
By following your recommendation, the choice is removed. I cannot see a benefit by removing the possibility to choose between Phobos and dub packages.

Kind regards
André
July 23, 2019
23.07.2019 13:31, greatsam4sure пишет:
> 
> My major problem with D is the critical community. It is discouraging to cope with. This forum is too critical about D challenges and says little or nothing about the strength of D. Most of the post here is about why D cannot succeed or be used. The organizer should do something about such a post. Just Google Dlang and reads the comments about the language, you will be discouraged to go further. But most of the comments are not true as I start learning D. Dlang is a beautiful language that is easy to use.
> 
> 
> I think the community should put out an article about D outline all the strength in a compelling way especially from proven industry users.

This is because people who think that D is a suitable language for their needs have no time to write posts just for fun because they are busy writing their products using D.

Interestingly that big part of posts that criticize D is written unknown people who has several posts if not single one.
July 23, 2019
On Tuesday, 23 July 2019 at 00:03:28 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:

> Digital transformation is about adaptiveness and speed.  Moore's Law is dead in economic terms and yet useful data sets might grow 10x in the next dozen years.  I don't think there will be a shortage of people in coming years wanting to write fast code fast and some of those will use D.  I've been saying this for a few years now and since then Mercedes, Audi and Weka are just a few of the notable adopters.  I don't think people were expecting that to happen five years ago.  These things take a long time.

Does the community / D Foundation have stats about the following things:

1. How many companies (big or small) have stopped using D over the years and why?
2. What do Netflix, Mercedes, Audi etc. use D for? In-house / niche programs, R&D or big real world applications? E.g. do command line tools that copy files count as "XYZ is using D now" too?
3. Have they continued to use D or was it just a one-off to see if it'd be a good option?

It's easy to drop names of big corporations, but it doesn't tell us anything, really.

Also, I suppose a lot of companies / people who just dropped D again wouldn't tell you because they a) couldn't be bothered or b) out for courtesy.
July 23, 2019
On Tuesday, 23 July 2019 at 10:15:52 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Tue, 2019-07-23 at 03:01 +0000, Exil via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> […]
>>
>
> What D needs is to rip everything out of Phobos that is not actually needed
> for the compiler to compile code and put it into the Dub repository as
> separate packages – this is what the Rust team did, and it was the right thing
> to do.

+1


July 23, 2019
On Tuesday, 23 July 2019 at 11:10:32 UTC, drug wrote:
> 23.07.2019 13:31, greatsam4sure пишет:

> This is because people who think that D is a suitable language for their needs have no time to write posts just for fun because they are busy writing their products using D.
>
> Interestingly that big part of posts that criticize D is written unknown people who has several posts if not single one.

(all names and events are fictitious)

Walter: Now you choose your Language. This you must feel inside. If it also chooses you, move quick, like I showed. You will have one chance, Jake.
Jake: How will I know if it chooses me?
Walter: It will try to kill you.
Jake: [after a brief pause] Outstanding...
July 23, 2019
On Tuesday, 23 July 2019 at 10:31:10 UTC, greatsam4sure wrote:

> I think the community should put out an article about D outline all the strength in a compelling way especially from proven industry users.

I personally think a much more valuable project is the GTKD tutorial. We *very seriously* need one for Dub. Rust has https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/index.html and we have https://dub.pm/getting_started (No, I will not write it, because I don't use Dub and I'm not the one telling people to use it.)