On Saturday, 20 November 2021 at 16:40:50 UTC, workman wrote:

I measure productivity as the number of seconds it takes to get from A to B.

On Saturday, 20 November 2021 at 13:40:21 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

Me too.

On Saturday, 20 November 2021 at 15:52:37 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:

I am of course not a representative of the general D programmer. Did you read what I wrote?

If 1 person points out X. Then it might be an aberration.

If 30 people independently point out X. Then it is a strong signal.

On Sunday, 21 November 2021 at 14:43:00 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

In case I was unclear:

1. The typical D user is not a regular on the forums. Only the hardcore users are regulars. Fulfilling their wishes does not necessarily satisfy the non-hardcore users.

2. The non-hardcore users use D every now and then. This is the majority. They are happy about some thing, unhappy about other things. Happy enough to dabble. Unhappy enough to not build larger things like frameworks.

Then you need to figure out what they are unhappy about and fix it. Until then the eco system will not grow. No matter how many users you have in category 2.

It is that simple. Yes?

On Saturday, 20 November 2021 at 16:47:38 UTC, user1234 wrote:

I think I understand what you mean.

The problem with DIPs is that they invite people to propose a series of additions that has nothing to do with what should be top priority. Python is adding new features with every release… at some point it will loose the essential quality of being "a simple language".

Languages like TypeScript and C# are appealing because they are designed by teams of experts, not by the most enthusiastic users of a language?

On Saturday, 20 November 2021 at 10:49:08 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

Sure, forums don't filter out people who aren't already committed like conferences tend to do. But also: sampling forum complainers has its own biases, they tend to be those of the inpatient and furious nature. Also more or less forum complaining suffers from cheapness of talk. Conference people have usually had to consider the limits of time/manpower/influence when pushing for changes. Forum complainers often have not.

That many people have been whining about the same things does not show the forum ranters any less biased. Conference people also often bring up same things as each other, yet we accept there is a bias in sampling just their opinions.

Do you think listening to the forum complainers paints a less distorted picture nonetheless, compared to people one meets at conferences? And if, what makes you think so?

On Sunday, 21 November 2021 at 16:24:58 UTC, Dukc wrote:

Absolutely. I agree. You cannot take their anger in itself as a need for changing the product. You can try to find out what the source of their anger is. It could for instance be a communication problem and not a product problem.

But if 30 people independently say that the Boehm-like GC is preventing them from becoming enthusiatic about the language, and that they therefore are limited to dabbling with it. Then you also should think that there is a rather large number of people that don't come to the forum and feel the same way. Does this mean not having a GC is the right resolution? Of course not. But it suggests that you might have greater enthusiasm in a greater proportion of your user base if you find a better solution for compiler backed memory management. And make that a priority.

People will not build a framework until they feel that the tool is solid (for their use case), until then they will dabble with a wait-and-see attitude.

Maybe. You should of course not accept the solution the complainers present, since it might cause other problems. But if it is a repeating pattern, then you should make it a priority to find a solution that create enthusiasm. By collecting many solution proposal (not a random DIP from a random user) you can get an idea of what options exists and can try to find synergies in the design space.

In essence I don't think the users should design the language. I think the designers should design the language. I think the designers should collect ideas from outside, then design something that makes the language become something clean and beautiful as a whole (rather than a mix of 100 different aesthetics from 100 different users)

The most enthusiastic users may not be able to lift up those issues that make other users less enthusiastic. The most enthusiastic users are likely to grow the complexity of the language if you were to accept all individual features they present. Each feature might be great, but not fit well with everything else.

The users that are enthusiastic are already productive. Do you want to prioritize that one group more productive? Or do you want to increase the number of well supported use cases by covering the needs of the less enthusiastic users?

Do you want to evolve the design into a corner that the most enthusiastic crowd is in? Or do you want to find a wider sense of common ground?

For instance, we now have many non-system-level programmers. We need to preserve their use case, absolutely! So we have to look for common ground with hardcore system level programmers. That is a challenge, but possible (I think). But I don't think that resolution will come from any individual user who is scratching his own itch. It has to come from a designer (or a user that is empathic to many different uses cases) that look for common ground and synergies in the design space.

Are we on the same page?

On Sunday, 21 November 2021 at 00:40:23 UTC, forkit wrote:

It wasn't a mistake for C++ to be compatible with C, but their users also don't crave automatic memory management.

For D the most problematic C feature is badly typed unions.

What is annoying is that there isn't all that much wrong with D, you just need to do adjustments to get more shiny than C++. But many adjustments:

• make type unification work so that an alias is an alias (or has that been fixed?)

• make integers non-modular so that you get better optimization and can do overflow checks

• clean up some syntax

• add ref counting optimizations

and so on.

If D focused on adjusting what is in the language rather than adding new stuff it could do well.

Sure.

On Friday, 19 November 2021 at 16:30:14 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:

Hacker news reporting all of Rust's mods just resigned.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29306845