On Thursday, 23 August 2018 at 03:50:44 UTC, Shachar Shemesh
wrote:
On 22/08/18 21:34, Ali wrote:
On Wednesday, 22 August 2018 at 17:42:56 UTC, Joakim wrote:
Pretty positive overall, and the negatives he mentions are
fairly obvious to anyone paying attention.
Yea, I agree, the negatives are not really negative
Walter not matter how smart he is, he is one man who can work
on the so many things at the same time
Its a chicken and egg situation, D needs more core
contributors, and to get more contributors it needs more
users, and to get more users it need more core contributors
No, no and no.
I was holding out on replying to this thread to see how the
community would react. The vibe I'm getting, however, is that
the people who are seeing D's problems have given up on
affecting change.
It is no secret that when I joined Weka, I was a sole D
detractor among a company quite enamored with the language. I
used to have quite heated water cooler debates about that point
of view.
Every single one of the people rushing to defend D at the time
has since come around. There is still some debate on whether,
points vs. counter points, choosing D was a good idea, but the
overwhelming consensus inside Weka today is that D has *fatal*
flaws and no path to fixing them.
And by "fatal", I mean literally flaws that are likely to
literally kill the language.
And the thing that brought them around is not my power of
persuasion. The thing that brought them around was spending a
couple of years working with the language on an every-day basis.
And you will notice this in the way Weka employees talk on this
forum: except me, they all disappeared. You used to see Idan,
Tomer and Eyal post here. Where are they?
This forum is hostile to criticism, and generally tries to keep
everyone using D the same way. If you're cutting edge D, the
forum is almost no help at all. Consensus among former posters
here is that it is generally a waste of time, so almost
everyone left, and those who didn't, stopped posting.
And it's not just Weka. I've had a chance to talk in private to
some other developers. Quite a lot have serious, fundamental
issues with the language. You will notice none of them speaks
up on this thread.
They don't see the point.
No technical project is born great. If you want a technical
project to be great, the people working on it have to focus on
its *flaws*. The D's community just doesn't do that.
To sum it up: fatal flaws + no path to fixing + no push from
the community = inevitable eventual death.
With great regrets,
Shachar
I agree with this. I no longer program in D, except for minor
things, because of this type of approach. D, as a language, is
the best. D as an actual practical tool is a deadly pit of
snakes... anyone of which can bite you, and that won't stop the
others. Of course, in the pit is where all the gold is at...
D's ecosystem is the problem, not the language(although, the bugs
in the implementation are a problem, they seem to be generally
solved and since the source is open it can be fixed when needed).
It is obviously the mentalities of the leaders... it always is,
that is why they are called leaders, because they lead and
whatever mentalities they have will shape who and what they lead.
It would be amazing to see someone like Microsoft implement a D#!
That would be a very impressive language and ecosystem! Specially
if it had both .net and native compilation and fixed some of the
major language issues D has.
My feeling is D is and will stay stagnate for the majority of the
world. It doesn't seem to have enough momentum to break out and
the "leaders" don't seem to know much about actually leading...
programming? Yes, but leading? No, not really...(obviously they
know something but I'm talking about what is required... a bill
gate like character, say, not that we want another one of those!)
D is one of those language where it's always something getting in
the way of zoning. Something really little and stupid but
constantly trips you up... it becomes a big drag after while. I'd
rather program in a language that has it's shit together where I
can write large projects in a 10th of the time and with a fourth
of the trouble.
Since time is money, you know these types of issues will stop
businesses from adopting D. The typical answer from the D
community is "Implement it in a library!" or "It has bindings!"
as if these are the solutions someone trying to get shit done
wants to hear. Usually the libraries are defunct in some way(bit
rot, version issues, shitty design, some deal breaker(e.g., uses
gc), shitty documentation, etc).
Since D is mainly community driven, this means that the community
will cobble shit together and then it becomes part of D. This is
good for shear amount of code generation but terrible for unity
of design. Everyone does it their way which results in many
different approaches to many different things(and this even gets
in the libraries and compiler design).
There has to be a sense of balance in anything, and this includes
leadership, compiler design, language features, etc... D does not
have that balance and people recognize that in whatever way they
see it and generally choose not to use it. The people that use it
have a defacto need to project D as a balanced language(oh, it
has this this and that! It has this and that and that over there
too if you jump through hoops A B and C). Very few people have
the intelligence to be able to admit they are going down the
wrong path and it's time to turn around. It's human nature to dig
and dig and dig and dig and dig and dig...
