February 13, 2018
On Tuesday, 13 February 2018 at 09:46:14 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
>
> Arguing, friction, grumbling, it's all a symptom of Ds open volunteer based development process IMO.

It's also how democracy works.

Walk into any parliament session, in any democracy, and you will see arguing, friction and grumbling.

You won't however, see that in authoritarian countries.


February 13, 2018
On Monday, 12 February 2018 at 23:54:29 UTC, Arun Chandrasekaran wrote:
> Sorry if I'm hurting someone's sentiment, but is it just me who is seeing so much negative trend in the D forum about D itself?

Here's an example from 2013, just a few months after I started using D. Andrei posted that Facebook had started using D in production. Someone thought the best possible response was to post this:

When you will look at claim that some language (lets take for example C# or Java) "supports feature X", that really means that the feature is supported. In D this for sure means that the feature is either broken or misdesigned (shared libraries, routine code breakages, obsolete ms32 object format, AA arrays, shared, const postblits, odd template crosstalk bugs, type system holes, segfaulting lambdas, unstable stdlib, absent of third-party libraries). Untill this stuff is fixed this is a huge barrier irrespective of whether D is used in Facebook or not.
February 13, 2018
On 2/12/18 11:29 PM, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:

A bunch of stuff I 100% agree with.

Thanks. Let's keep the negativity coming, and we'll all be better for it ;) Problems don't get fixed if you ignore them or pretend they don't exist. It's part of a healthy debate. If you don't like the negativity, or you feel it's just trolling, ignore it.

-Steve
February 13, 2018
On Tuesday, 13 February 2018 at 14:17:00 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On 2/12/18 11:29 PM, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
>
> A bunch of stuff I 100% agree with.

Me too.  So refreshing to read.

Mike


February 13, 2018
On Tuesday, 13 February 2018 at 03:40:52 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> {snip} I suspect that part of it is that a lot of folks seem to come to D looking for the perfect language after having be frustrated by another language like C++, and while D is a lot closer to that for many folks than other languages are, it still has plenty of flaws, and we want those flaws fixed so that it can become the perfect language. Obviously, that's not going to happen. No language is perfect, but the vocal portion of the D community does have a tendency to want to push for everything that's arguably wrong with D to be fixed, and that can result in a lot of negativity, but it can also result in things getting fixed (though that requires actually doing something about it rather than just complaining).

I think what would help here is a D wiki page (maybe <https://wiki.dlang.org/Language_issues> could be expanded) that lists perceived flaws in the language, together with an explanation whether or not it's really considered a flaw, and if it is, why it's not being fixed. Those not-being-fixed reasons are the real crux of the issue, I think:

  * If the reason is lack of manpower or expertise in the area, then complaints about the flaw can be responded with, "see [that wiki page], can you pitch in?".

  * If the reason is that by fixing the issue it would cause problems {x}, {y}, and {z}, then the person raising the complaint learns something about language design.

  * If the reason is the language design team's personal preference on the matter, and the tradeoffs are listed, then users learn what the tradeoffs are and have to live with it.

  * If the reason for not fixing the issue is hesitation to break backward compatibility, then this may be an issue that D leadership wants to hear feedback on.

But I think pointing people to that wiki page and laying it out like that may diffuse a lot of arguments.

February 13, 2018
On Tuesday, 13 February 2018 at 11:36:35 UTC, psychoticRabbit wrote:
> On Tuesday, 13 February 2018 at 08:08:28 UTC, bauss wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 13 February 2018 at 01:32:29 UTC, psychoticRabbit wrote:

> Personally, I found that youtube video (Life is better with Rust's community automation - YouTube) rather disturbing.

Psychotic rabbit disturbed by programming related video. In other news....
February 13, 2018
On Monday, 12 February 2018 at 23:54:29 UTC, Arun Chandrasekaran wrote:
> Sorry if I'm hurting someone's sentiment, but is it just me who is seeing so much negative trend in the D forum about D itself? I don't remember seeing so much negative about Rust on rust forum and so on. Do you think it will help in reminding people not to post any negative things? It shouldn't become strict moderation, but at the same time, I really don't like seeing so much negative trend. I would even go to the extent and suggest to email Walter/Andrei in person (even if they don't agree) to vent your frustration with D, but please don't post it on the forum.

Several structural reasons for negativity (I'll be negative myself saying all that):

- It's an internet forum - and an addictive one - so each message has a bit of social standing at stake. Strong talk is thus mechanically encouraged, makes you appear strong and knowledgeable, like a big meeting room. It's common for internet forums to devolve into negativity.

- Because we don't ban people from the forums, some individuals that don't use D and have zero skin in the game come here to spread negativity at every occasion.

If you delve into the smaller D communitites they aren't especially negative, on the contrary. The forums are not the D community at large, it's an addictive subset of it. If the forums were _worse_ to use, we wouldn't have this problem.
February 13, 2018
On Tuesday, 13 February 2018 at 02:29:46 UTC, Seb wrote:
> On Monday, 12 February 2018 at 23:54:29 UTC, Arun Chandrasekaran wrote:
>> [...]
>
> Yeah, I think it's a different community.
> I'm not sure why this is the case, maybe because Rust doesn't promise to be a great language and people suffer enough from fighting their compiler all day, that they have no energy left for trolling?
>
> [...]

Never heard of Steve Klabnik but browsing through his blog I came across this;
http://words.steveklabnik.com/the-expressive-c-17-coding-challenge-in-rust
and here is the original C++ challenge;
https://www.fluentcpp.com/2017/10/23/results-expressive-cpp17-coding-challenge/

I wonder what the some code would like like in D.
February 13, 2018
On Tuesday, 13 February 2018 at 17:03:26 UTC, flamencofantasy wrote:
> On Tuesday, 13 February 2018 at 02:29:46 UTC, Seb wrote:
>> On Monday, 12 February 2018 at 23:54:29 UTC, Arun Chandrasekaran wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
>> Yeah, I think it's a different community.
>> I'm not sure why this is the case, maybe because Rust doesn't promise to be a great language and people suffer enough from fighting their compiler all day, that they have no energy left for trolling?
>>
>> [...]
>
> Never heard of Steve Klabnik but browsing through his blog I came across this;
> http://words.steveklabnik.com/the-expressive-c-17-coding-challenge-in-rust
> and here is the original C++ challenge;
> https://www.fluentcpp.com/2017/10/23/results-expressive-cpp17-coding-challenge/
>
> I wonder what the some code would like like in D.

Previous discussions on this: https://forum.dlang.org/post/or0o85$tvc$1@digitalmars.com
February 13, 2018
On Monday, 12 February 2018 at 23:54:29 UTC, Arun Chandrasekaran wrote:
> Sorry if I'm hurting someone's sentiment, but is it just me who is seeing so much negative trend in the D forum about D itself?

The reason is (as I see it) is very simple. People have/had a lot of expectations about the language, its future and invest/invested a lot of their time/money to the language. But D is a community driven language and sometime we can have question like that:

- - - - -
Do we have strong business driven goals? (Go)
Do we have strong theory driven goals? (Rust)
Do we follow main initial promise to be better / to replace C/C++?

The last one question is the most important. Instead of targeting a real market for as, which is C/C++, we are building a "trendy" language to compete with Python/Java/Go/Rust. Trends are changing but C/C++ market are waiting us!
- - - - -

Community is moving. I see it during 8-9 years. The problem is direction and speed.

So, if you see next time a negative emotions from someone just remember that possibly this person likes the language and wants it to be better then it is.

Best,
Ilya