D has some great developers working on it, past and present. The thing that moved me away from it was a lack of purpose, which isn't exactly how I would have p

D has some great developers working on it, past and present. The thing that moved me away from it was a lack of purpose, which isn't exactly how I would have put it at the time, but in hindsight seems obvious. The way in which I'm certain that this is true is that if you had the leads try to create a Venn diagram of what the project does and what is central to it vs periphery, they would fail to agree. And if they fail to do that, they will fail to coordinate on the features. And that creates the stagnation and difficulty with contributions. As well, the reason why that failure leads to a retreat into technical digression - which I know happens out of personal experience - is because that deflects questions by adding scope. It promises an escape from the confrontation: "if I just accumulate more work, it will all come together someday". The problem is that adding scope doesn't solve the contradictions that made you retreat in the first place, it can actually deepen them by creating sunk costs. It's a bad adaptation to the challenge. If we compare it with, for example, the Niklaus Wirth approach, he would have the Venn diagram completely clear in his mind before committing to any real implementation. And therefore the language would do exactly what he wanted it to do, and it wouldn't need to be scoped into a 20-year project. Thus, he made many languages during his life, mostly of a similar flavor, but with a clear intent of adding something specific that he hadn't covered before.