Vision/2017H2

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This document discusses the high-level vision for D with semestrial granularity. It is released in January and July of each year.

Note: This document focuses on goals the D leadership works on, explicitly fosters, or strongly believes are important for the success of the D language. Other contributions are always welcome and do not need to be necessarily aligned with this document.

H1 2017 Review

TODO

H2 2017 Priorities

Technical

TODO

Non-Technical

• Make it easier for people to contribute (aka remove entry barriers)
  • Action: add more tooling to help with initial problems (there are a couple of ideas in the DLang-Bot queue, which should get deployed in the near future)
  • Action: improve contributor documentation and getting started (should be done by people who haven't seen the DMD/Phobos setup & codebase)
  • Action: encourage the "a fix is only a PR away" mentality (blog post?)
  • Action: find out what makes potential contributors bounce? (e.g. I heard that the registration at Bugzilla is sometimes a blocker for people willing to submit a bug report)

• Encourage people to continue to be contributors (increase motivation)
  • Avoid PRs being stalled in the review queue
  • Action: increase interaction/communication between contributors. NG, mailing list nor IRC seem to work. Slack?
  • Action: make it easy for contributors to adopt a small-scale project (e.g. approved functions to Phobos, ...)
  • Action: promote the beginner/bootcamp Bugzilla tags (they are currently hard to find)
  • Action: publish a blog post(s) about a "success story" ([1] was a good step, but I haven't seen much since)
  • Action: create a positive, constructive environment. If I wouldn't know D now for a longer time, phrases like "I hate change" [3] would probably discourage me quite quickly. I don't want to pick on Stefan here (though there are more precedents e.g. with a quick search I found [2,4,5,6,...]), my main point is that contributors are heavily influenced by the feedback they get from "official" DLang people.