On Wednesday, 27 February 2013 at 00:01:31 UTC, Andrei
Alexandrescu wrote:
I understand how you see it, and honestly could see it from a
mile. When a post (a) cherry-picks all negatives and (b) has a
final tone that mentions no possible solution - it's a foregone
conclusion that no amount of explaining, amending, arguing,
etc. will improve the poster's outlook.
I could say e.g. "Well I think things have changed, and look
we've turned the bug trend curve (http://goo.gl/kf4ZC) which is
unprecedented, fixed some incomplete features, break new
records on bug fixes with each release, and have a big
conference coming." - to which I have no doubt it's possible to
concoct a negative answer.
So I understand you have a negative outlook on D. That's
entirely fine, as is mentioning it on the forum. The only thing
I'd like you to understand and appreciate is that we who work
on D are doing our best to find solutions to the various
problems in front of us, and in quite a literal sense we don't
know how to do any better. The constructive thing I'm getting
out of this is that we could use some more radicalization - try
things that push stronger against our comfort zone. I have a
few in mind but it's too early to discuss them publicly.
Andrei
Let me emphasize again, I did *not* intend to discuss the
specific features, Walter brought that topic up. I intended to
point out the lack of good general guidelines for the D design
process. And i did actually mention one (partial) solution. I
mean no disrespect to the hard work of the contributers and did
not wish to discourage them, just to prevent wasted effort due to
lack of proper guidelines.
The other criticism I have is exactly the last paragraph above.
Rust is designed in the open and so I can read the weekly minutes
and get the bigger picture of the design process, what are the
different proposed alternatives, what are the considerations and
trade-offs, etc. In D on the other hand, it's all closed. D
claims that it is an open source project but all the major design
decisions happen personally between you and Walter and this is
worse than big company languages that at least publish some
articles online.
