On Wednesday, 11 July 2018 at 21:19:18 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
I agree. And I must admit that from that point of view I'm indeed part of the problem...
Its a problem every open source project faces. No matter if its D or Crystal or ...
The main issue is that many people in those open source project forget, that the people who come to their project/language are only looking to use it for their work. They are not looking to spend x amount of time on open source development because they have their own projects or work.
Is it unfair that the mass benefits from the work of the few. Sure. But putting the blame on the people who use the tools and see them as problems is kind of ironic.
If the goal is to get a successful language, those type of blame attitudes are only counter productive. For most people its easy to switch languages when they have little invested and complain about issues.
Its the same with the donations. I stated before that D as a organisation with its financing feels very mysterious. You do not see where the money goes and people are not motivated to donate to a organisation when they feel their complains are not taken serious.
A lot of open source project simply forget that its all about marketing and community creation. If you fail at one of them, like being semi aggressive when new users complain, it simply cuts into your own pockets.
D has a massive increased in downloads but has a hard time actually keeping the people interested who download the D compiler. That normally needs to be a wake up call for any community.
I think a larger issue is that a lot of older community members have been with the D language for years upon years and they are tired of people complaining on issues. It also does not help that D simply keeps getting more features that few people care about outside a very small group of programmers. BetterC ... your not going to convert a lot of C developers. D as a C++ replacement, C++ 14/17 keeps improving, why change over to D with less resources.
In my personal opinion Crystal is gaining more momentum then D despite that D has a much more active blog/communication.
Part of that is simply that people come to D looking for a easy language and discover the over focus on C/C++ and run into the issues. Add a bit of semi-aggressive forum members when complains show up and there goes your new user looking at Go or another language.
