On Thursday, 23 August 2018 at 07:37:07 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
On Thursday, 23 August 2018 at 06:58:13 UTC, Joakim wrote:
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.
Can you list what you or other Weka devs believe those fatal
flaws to be? Because you've not listed any here, which makes
you no better than some noob that comes in here, says D has to
get better or it will die, then can't articulate what they
mean by "better" or worse, mentions something trivial. Of
course, you've actually used the language for years, so
presumably you've got some real concerns, but do you really
think the bug you just posted is "fatal" to the language?
If you think there are fatal flaws, you might as well list
them, whether technical or the development process, or you
will just be ignored like any other noob who talks big and
can't back it up. You may be ignored anyway, ;) but at least
you'll have made a case that shows you know what you're
talking about.
I'd define fatal as some that can be fixed, but breaks 100% of
everyone's code, even if the change is net positive all round.
However how big a problem really is is in the eye of the
beholder. An example:
Symptom: The compiler can't discard unused symbols at compile
time, and so it will spend a lot of time pointlessly optimising
code.
Problem: D has no notion of symbol visibility.
Possible Solution: Make all globals hidden by default unless
'export'.
Side effects: Everyone will be spending weeks to months fixing
their libraries in order to only mark what should be visible
outside the current compilation unit as 'export'.
Benefits: Faster compile times, as in, in the most extreme
example I've built one project on github with gdc -O2 and build
time went from 120 seconds to just 3!
So your example of a fatal flaw is that D could be 100X faster at
compilation instead of just 10X than most every other native
language out there?! C'mon.
On Thursday, 23 August 2018 at 09:09:40 UTC, Shachar Shemesh
wrote:
On 23/08/18 09:58, Joakim wrote:
Because you've not listed any here, which makes you no better
than some noob
Here's one: the forum does not respond well to criticism.
Sounds more like you don't respond well to criticism, as the
point stands that your original post was content-free.
Here's an incredibly partial list:
* Features not playing well together.
Despite what Joakim seems to think, I've actually brought up an
example in this thread.
Despite what you seem to think, perhaps because you didn't read
what I wrote very closely, I noted your bugzilla link in my post
you're quoting and asked you if you really thought it was fatal.
Here is another one:
functions may be @safe, nothrow, @nogc, pure. If it's a method
it might also be const/inout/immutable, static. The number of
libraries that support all combinations is exactly zero (e.g. -
when passing a delegate in).
Yes, this is a known problem with D: why do you think it's fatal?
* Language complexity
Raise your hand if you know how a class with both opApply and
the get/next/end functions behaves when you pass it to foreach.
How about a struct? Does it matter if it allows copying or not?
The language was built because C++ was deemed too complex!
Please see the thread about lazy [1] for a case where a
question actually has an answer, but nobody seems to know it
(and the person who does know it is hard pressed to explain the
nuance that triggers this).
By this rationale, C++ should be dead by now. Why do you think
it's fatal to D?
* Critical bugs aren't being solved
People keep advertising D as supporting RAII. I'm sorry, but
"supports RAII" means "destructors are always run when the
object is destroyed". If the community (and in this case, this
includes Walter) sees a bug where that doesn't happen as not
really a bug, then there is a deep problem, at least,
over-promising. Just say you don't support RAII and destructors
are unreliable and live with the consequences.
BTW: Python's destructors are unworkable, but they advertise it
and face the consequences. The D community is still claiming
that D supports RAII.
Maybe they're not critical to everyone else? How much time or
money exactly has Weka spent on getting this issue and other
"critical" bugs fixed? It is fairly laughable for a company that
raised $42 million to complain that a bunch of unpaid volunteers
aren't fixing bugs fast enough for them:
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/weka-io
* The community
Oh boy.
Someone who carries weight needs to step in when the forum is
trying to squash down on criticism. For Mecca, I'm able to do
that [2], but for D, this simply doesn't happen.
As Walter pointed out, "the forum" is not some D hive mind: it's
a community filled with differing opinions. As I've faced what I
felt to be unthinking criticism on another issue I raised only
indirectly related to D, I know somewhat of what you're talking
about, but honestly, there is a lot of criticism of D and its
process too here.
Anybody on the internet is free to criticize any opinion you post
online, you need to get a thicker skin. I really don't see much
"squashing" going on, and I've previously argued against
deleting/banning even those who voiced their criticism of D in
uncouth ways:
https://forum.dlang.org/post/[email protected]
Walter generally has a light touch with deletions/bans.
This is a partial list, but it should give you enough to not
accusing me of making baseless accusations. The simple point of
the matter is that anyone who's been following what I write
should already be familiar with all of the above.
I see, so every single bug you've ever posted to the forum in the
past was a fatal flaw? If so, I question your judgement. If not,
I was simply looking for some prioritization, which flaws were
"fatal" and why.
The main thing for me, however, is how poorly the different D
features fit together (my first point above). The language
simply does not feel like it's composed of building blocks I
can use to assemble whatever I want. It's like a Lego set where
you're not allowed to place a red brick over a white brick if
there is a blue brick somewhere in your building.
This is a common criticism of D. You may be right that it will be
"fatal." All I was looking for was substantive claims like this.
On Thursday, 23 August 2018 at 09:16:23 UTC, Mihails 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. D would really
benefit from a project manager, which I think Martin Nowak has
tried to do, and which the companies using D and the community
should get together and fund as a paid position. Maybe it
could be one of the funding targets for the Foundation.
If the job was well-defined, so I knew exactly what we're
getting by hiring that person, I'd contribute to that.
Didn't intend to chime in, but no, that was not what I have
meant at all.
I never said that's what you "meant," it was my own suggestion to
make things better.
