On Thursday, 23 October 2014 at 07:54:05 UTC, ketmar via
Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
On Thu, 23 Oct 2014 07:47:00 +0000
via Digitalmars-d-learn <digitalmars-d-learn@puremagic.com>
wrote:
On Thursday, 23 October 2014 at 06:59:16 UTC, ketmar via
Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> besides, no "serious" language can live without "legacy".
> legacy is a sign of maturity. ;-)
So you are basically saying that D is a teenager for whom
wearing ugly make-up is a sign of maturity?
exactly. it seems to me that some D developers have strange
feeling
that accumulating legacy will show D maturity and will help D
to become
more widespread. despite all "#breakourcode" requests from real
D users.
I would be very surprised if anyone thinks that. It's a question
of what breakage is worth making and the fact that every time we
break people's code, we risk ticking users off and scaring them
away. It doesn't work to become widespread - particularly in
production - when you frequently break people's code (even with a
good reason), and breakage needs a good reason even when it's
rare. Deciding whether a particular change is worth making is
always a subject of big debate. There _are_ cases where most
everyone agrees and yet Walter won't make the change, but there
are also plenty where there definitely isn't a consensus. For
attributes, there's a consensus that the situation is not ideal,
but there definitely isn't a consensus on what we should do about
it or whether it's worth breaking code to fix it. And because
it's pretty much an aesthetic thing, it's exactly the sort of
thing where it would be very difficult to convince Walter or
Andrei to make the change (especially Walter). Making the change
won't fix any bugs and won't prevent any bugs, so it's a hard
sell.
Regardless, no one is actually aruging that we want to leave any
kind of legacy cruft in the language just so that we have legacy
cruft and therefore look mature. It comes down to whether fixing
that legacy cruft is worth it when everything else is taken into
account, and because we are very much trying to make it so that D
is mature enough to be used in production and gets wider
adoption, the bar that something has to pass in order to be
considered worth changing (particularly by Walter) is much, much
higher than it would have been a few years ago.
- Jonathan M Davis
