On 12/14/11 2:30 AM, Don wrote:
On 14.12.2011 05:37, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
There is no abandonment. Also, where is that 50/50 estimate from? Just
curious.
The D2 community is definitely bigger than the D1 community. But how
much more?
I presume it's quite a bit larger. But then both are small, and we're
interested in the potential and the rate of adoption.
It's hard to be sure, but the Tango users used to be 75% of the
community, based on a few polls that were held, but they never had much
representation on the ng. I guess between half and 2/3 are gone now.
That seems a reasonable assessment. Possibly even more left.
I don't think the entire D community is as big as it was back then
(based on number of public repositories).
That is also entirely possible.
Additionally, the number of contributors, and level of activity, in
Tango, was higher than Phobos has ever had.
Agreed.
But this is all missing the mark - why would we cry over spilled milk.
The point is assessing the state of affairs the minute before the
announcement. How active was Tango? How active were the Tango forums?
Where were other forums of the D1 community? In this day and age, I'd be
hard-pressed to think of an active programming language community that
has no online presence whatsoever.
To add to that, there was no trickle of bug reports or pull requests for
D1, although clearly D1 does have its bugs and issues. I haven't
followed Tango closely, but if D1 had a large active community, Tango
would receive a lot of attention from its users as it's the de facto
standard library for D1. Yet the last post
(http://www.dsource.org/projects/tango/forums/topic/903) dates from
March 30. The intervals between changes to the trunk
(http://www.dsource.org/projects/tango/changeset/5691/) are measured in
months.
I hope you'll agree that one would be hard-pressed to infer from the
evidence there is that there's a large, active, and thriving D1 community.
It also diffused our focus, delayed us to an ever-increasing extent,
What on earth gives you that idea? The only resources involved are some
fraction of Walter's time, which is obviously an important resource, but
nobody other than Walter is affected.
Walter told me so, and Walter is the single most important bottleneck.
So "us" means Walter?
A delay originated by Walter delays the entire community. So by "us" I
meant the community.
You're seriously misrepresenting
the situation.
What is an accurate representation of the situation, and what evidence
is there to back that up?
This is an issue of Walter's time, and nothing more.
Walter said that he'd rather not spend that time anymore.
I think the
evidence for that is clear -- who else is spending time on D1?
As I mentioned, the larger issue is the message we're sending out. We
can't serve two masters, and we need to focus and specialize our brand.
Please trust me on this; in only a few short months I'm confident you
will agree this will have been a good move.
Important thing to notice: GDC and LDC also have D1 compilers. Does this
decision apply to them?
No.
I spend some time on fixing D1 bugs, but that won't change, see below.
and
sent the wrong message out that we're lacking confidence of what our
core thrust is, so we're trying to sort of please everyone. ("Here's
our
flagship language! If you don't like it, well, we have another one.")
This is a silly and offensive statement. Most languages are in this
situation. Look at Python2 vs Python3, Perl6 vs Perl5.
I wonder who would be offended by that.
Other than me? Well, I think the Python guys would be offended if you
said it of them.
2. The deadline is more than a year away. This is a long time, enough
for us to make D2 compelling, and also for interested people to
migrate.
No, it's an exceedingly short timeframe.
Other vendors give similar time scale for much larger migrations.
Only when the migration is to a mature product.
Agreed. All things considered, one year seems to me a resonable time
frame. It's reasonable of you to disagree. Time will tell whom of us was
right.
What gives you the idea that
nobody is using D1?
There is not one sentence in my message claiming nobody is using D1.
Ok, I can't make sense of it otherwise.
Don, it is you who is misrepresenting the situation, and repeatedly. I
understand you find this frustrating, but please, let's have a
constructive dialog.
Have you thought about what would convince them to
switch to D2, and what would be required for them to do it?
I think the most important aspect for them would be completion of
Tango's port to D2. The recent progress in the matter is encouraging. If
the D1 community is sizable, resourceful, and interested, I believe that
to be within the realm of possibility.
At the present time, do they actually desire to move to D2? If not, why
not? And the big one: are they confident that D2 is sufficiently stable?
I don't know what they think. Based on the observations I outlined
above, I can hypothesize (a) the interest to move to D2 is scant; (b)
the main reason is Tango is not working with D2; and (c) I don't know
and I don't think that's the gating factor (Tango is). I'll venture the
opinion that the D1-like subset of D2 is as stable than D1.
I suspect you don't know much about the D1 community. (Note that only a
small fraction of D users have ever used the newsgroup, and it's mostly
people with an interest in language design. They are not
representative).
I can already say with certainty that I will still be using D1 in 2013.
That's great. The decision does not make it impossible or even
particularly difficult for D1 users to continue using D1. Since there
were near zero bug reports on D1,
There are 400 open bugzilla D1 + common D1/D2 compiler bugs in Bugzilla,
including nearly all of the heavily voted bugs. D1 is very much more
stable than D2 (D2 has 800 open bugs), so there are far fewer bug reports.
More bug reports does not imply less stability because number of users
also affects the numbers. Also, there is heavy community activity to fix
D2 bugs but not D1 bugs. It's reasonable to assume there aren't many
people waiting for some D1 bug to be fixed. They either found a
workaround or left the language.
If you mean, there were no bug reports on the beta, that's not
suprising, there are no D1 Phobos changes, which is where regressions
mostly show up.
I wasn't referring to this beta as much as the overall pattern of
reporting D1 bugs, discussing them, and contributing fixes to them.
they can be assumed to be content with
the quality of the compiler. Really I don't see the gist of the
complaint. This is not abandonment.
You, Andrei, are personally making a decision which affects the entire
community. I'm actually a bit shocked that you've done this.
Walter and I made this decision together. This is not a decision of the
community because, again, people like to postpone, keep options open,
and be generous with others' time. To give a counter-example, I asked
for community input on the new website although I was advised against
it. Indeed I've been racked over coals, but the ultimate result is a
much better website than it would have otherwise been.
If I knew of your response, we would have made sure to pass it by you,
and I apologize we didn't. (I assume the entire core team would be on
board with the decision, and aside from you, my perception is that it
is.) But if you have already enumerated the arguments you would have
made prior to making the decision, I think you'd agree they wouldn't
have been compelling.
Especially since there was a big public discussion on the D internals
newsgroup (Nov 10) about reducing the pressure of Walter's time.
---------
Kenji:
> Today only Walter improvements D1 branch. Almost dmd pulls only
> consider D2 branch. Should we add D1 patch at the same time?
Walter:
Merging with D1 hasn't been too difficult; I use a program called "meld"
which makes it a snap.
....
It usually takes a couple hours to merge a patch, if things go smoothly.
Most of that is running the test suite. Some more time is spent updating
the changelog and bugzilla.
----
So, didn't sound then as though D1 was a big issue. Yet a month later
you announce you've made a private decision about axing D1.
Feels exactly like a military coup.
Well I am as surprised about your surprise as you are about the fact
itself. About this, I repeat that Walter's time is one component, but
not the major one. We can assume it costs him zero time; still the
decision to announce ceasing D1 support in one year is a good one.
Please trust me on this one, and may D1's blood be on me if I made a
mistake.
Andrei
