On 06/02/2016 10:48 AM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
On Thu, Jun 02, 2016 at 09:06:44AM -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
[...]
ZombineDev, I've been at the top level in the C++ community for many
many years, even after I wanted to exit :o). I'm familiar with how the
committee that steers C++ works, perspective that is unique in our
community - even Walter lacks it. I see trends and patterns. It is
interesting how easily a small but very influential priesthood can
alienate itself from the needs of the larger community and get into a
frenzy over matters that are simply missing the point.
Appeal to authority.
You cut the context, which was rampant speculation.
This is what's happening here. We worked ourselves to a foam because
the creator of the language started a thread entitled "The Case
Against Autodecode", whilst fully understanding there is no way to
actually eliminate autodecode.
I think that's a misrepresentation of the situation. I was getting
increasingly unhappy with autodecoding myself, completely independently
of Walter, and in fact have filed bugs and posted complaints about it
long before Walter started his thread. I used to be a supporter of
autodecoding, but over time it has become increasingly clear to me that
it was a mistake. The fact that you continue to deny this and write it
off in the face of similar complaints raised by many active D users is
very off-putting, to say the least, and does not inspire confidence. Not
to mention the fact that you started this thread yourself with a
question about what it is we dislike about autodecoding, yet after
having received a multitude of complaints, corrobated by many forum
members, you simply write off the whole thing like it was nothing. If
you want D to succeed, you need to raise the morale of the community,
and this is not the way to raise morale.
There is no denying. If I did things all over again, autodecoding would
not be in. But also string would not be immutable(char)[] which is the
real mistake.
Some of the arguments in here have been good, but many (probably the
majority) of them were not so much. A good one didn't even come up,
Walter told it to me over the phone: the reality of invalid UTF strings
forces you to mind the representation more often than you'd want in an
ideal world.
There is no "writing off". Again, the real solution here is RCStr. We
can't continue with immutable(char)[] as our flagship string.
Autodecoding is the least of its problems.
The very definition of a useless debate, the kind he and I had agreed
to not initiate anymore. It was a mistake. I'm still metaphorically
angry at him for it.
On the contrary, I found that Walter's willingness to admit past
mistakes very refreshing, even if practically speaking we can't actually
get rid of autodecoding today. What he proposed in the other thread is
actually a workable step towards reversing the wrong decision behind
autodecoding, that doesn't leave existing users out in the cold, and
that we might actually be able to pull off if done carefully. I know
you probably won't see it the same way, since you still seem convinced
that autodecoding was a good idea, but you need to understand that your
opinion is not representative in this case.
I don't see it the same way. Yes, I agree my opinion is not
representative. I'd also say I'm glad I can do something about this.
[...]
Meanwhile, I go to conferences. Train and consult at large companies.
Dozens every year, cumulatively thousands of people. I talk about D
and ask people what it would take for them to use the language.
Invariably I hear a surprisingly small number of reasons:
* The garbage collector eliminates probably 60% of potential users
right off.
At least we have begun to do something about this. That's good news.
I've been working on RCStr for the past few days. I'd get a lot more
work done if I didn't need to talk sense into people in this thread.
* Tooling is immature and of poorer quality compared to the
competition.
And what have we done about it? How long has it been since dfix existed,
yet we still haven't really integrated it into the dmd toolchain?
I've spoken to Brian about it. Dfix does not do lookup, which makes it
sadly not up for meaningful uses.
* Safety has holes and bugs.
And what have we done about it?
Walter and I are working on safe RC.
* Hiring people who know D is a problem.
There are many willing candidates right here. :-P
Nice.
* Documentation and tutorials are weak.
And what have we done about this?
http://tour.dlang.org is a good start.
* There's no web services framework (by this time many folks know of
D, but of those a shockingly small fraction has even heard of vibe.d).
I have strongly argued with Sönke to bundle vibe.d with dmd over one
year ago, and also in this forum. There wasn't enough interest.
What about linking to it in a prominent place on dlang.org? This isn't
a big problem, AFAICT. I don't think it takes months and years to put
up a big prominent banner promoting vibe.d on, say, the download page of
dlang.org.
PR please. I can't babysit everything. I'm preparing for a conference
where I'll evangelize for D next week
(http://ndcoslo.com/speaker/andrei-alexandrescu/). As I mentioned at
DConf, for better or worse this is the kind of stuff I cannot delegate.
That kind of work is where the community would really make an impact,
not a large debate that I need to worry will lead to some silly rash
decision.
* (On Windows) if it doesn't have a compelling Visual Studio plugin,
it doesn't exist.
And what have we done about this?
I'm actively looking for a collaboration.
One of the things that I have found a little disappointing with D is
that while it has many very promising features, it lacks polish in many
small details. Such as the way features interact with each other in
corner cases. E.g., the whole can't-use-gc from dtor debacle, the
semantics of closures over aggregate members, holes in @safe, holes in
const/immutable in unions, the whole import mess that took
oh-how-many-years to clean up that thankfully was finally improved
recently, can't use @nogc with Phobos, can't use const/pure/etc. in
Object.toString, Object.opEqual, et al (which we've been trying to get
of since how many years ago now?), and a whole long list of small
irritations that in themselves are nothing, but together add up like a
dustball to an overall perception of lack of polish.
It's a fair perspective. Those annoy me as well. I'll also note every
language has such matter, including the mainstream ones. At some point
we need to acknowledge they're there but they're small enough to live
with. (Some of those you enumerated aren't small, e.g. the holes in @safe.)
I'm more sympathetic to Walter's stance of improving the language for
*current* users, instead of bending over backwards to please would-be
adopters who may never actually adopt the language -- they'd just come
back with new excuses of why they can't adopt D yet. If you make
existing users happier, they will do all the work of evangelism for you,
instead of you having to fight the uphill battle by yourself while
bleeding away current users due to poor morale.
We want to improve the language for current AND future users. RCStr is
part of that.
Andrei
