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Comment by tlivolsi | Hacker News Reader

What's Walther's take on the many gripes with the D leadership?

He pretty much derailed the D forum forking thread into remotely related tech discussion. This was weird to observe tbo, in the end my take is that he doesn't seem to bother much and would rather continue living in his version of the story.

It's worth pointing out that Walter is one of two co-maintainers of the language. The other has not said anything at all. On the other hand, I'm not sure what there is to say if they're not going to make any changes in the process.

I'm far more concerned about community development of libraries, IDE support, and the beginner experience (especially on Windows) than I am about changes to the language, which is already pretty good. As a Linux user working on top of C libraries, the experience is incredible. That's not the case for everyone.

Aren‘t these connected? Its about the contribution culture. If there is so much pain that it led to a language fork, what IDE and quality of life improvements from a shrinking community can we talk about? When I started with D several years ago, there were a few meetups and active contributors. These ppl now have left D for Rust and now we have this fork. Does it look like there is success ahead? I would say it looks more like the last desperate effort to change things.

I view them as two separate issues. On the one side, there are the complaints about language changes. It's hard to convince Walter to change the language, and it's hard to contribute to the compiler and/or standard library (those are the complaints, true or not).

Then there are problems for users of the language not having enough libraries and a sub-par IDE experience (again, true or not). Go and Rust built communities of programmers that aggressively used the language and made their work available to others. I don't see any reason we couldn't have more of that with the language as it currently stands. Adam certainly had no trouble knocking out hundreds of thousands of lines of nice libraries. Edit: And Ilya doing all his good work with Mir.

The first is a long-term problem. We'll see the effects ten years from now. The second makes it hard to have a reason to use the language right now (largely for anyone that doesn't want to write scripts or interact with C libraries). That's most of what concerns me.

I just posted on the forum about it, I didn't do it before because of surgery (I'm still nowhere near 100%).

What changes would you like to see happen?

I recognize that pattern of behavior because I've done something similar at times myself. Or at least, in my pattern it was this: what's done is done, confronting it will just create a lot more drama for me, and I don't feel confident in wading into a fraught social situation anyway. I'm much more in my element working on technical problems. So I let the social thing go and go work on the technical thing. This is not always a healthy thing to do, but to me it's not in the least weird.

That being said, never assume that no response from someone means someone doesn't care. I felt awful when dealing with situations like this. If this were my project, I would probably be extremely frustrated and more than a little bummed, whether or not I thought the fork was understandable.

Those are not things that are constructive to air in public, though, and I think it is a mark of leadership that Walter's dialogue remains as calm and polite through all of that thread as he usually is.

> That being said, never assume that no response from someone means someone doesn't care. I felt awful when dealing with situations like this. If this were my project, I would probably be extremely frustrated and more than a little bummed, whether or not I thought the fork was understandable.

Contrariwise, I read through that forum thread and some of the linked github issues, and it wouldn't be shocking if he were happy to see some of those people walk away. It would not be politic for him to say so.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him comment here on a D related post. Which I totally understand.

I've definitely seen him discuss D here when it comes up.

Only when D itself isn't the matter being discussed.

He did on this post, here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38988220

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