On Wednesday, 6 February 2013 at 02:36:13 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
On Tuesday, February 05, 2013 21:22:34 Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
Note that most people tend to vastly overestimate their few
first
language designs, and that there are much more people who
think are good
at language design than those actually are. (Note I'm only
passing
opinion on what I saw; You may as well be an awesome language
designer,
but the spark is not visible in this particular proposal.)
Though I've
had an idea or two that stuck, I confess without any false
modesty that
I don't consider myself to be a noted language designer.
Another thing to consider is that it's fairly common for people
to come up
with ideas that seem like very good ideas and seem very solid
but which
ultimately end up falling apart due to corner cases. And we're
already
suffering from features which are partially implemented and not
necessarily
fully thought through, even if they're solid in their basics.
As far as changing D goes, we're far enough along in the
process that anything
which would break backwards compatibility needs a really
compelling case for
it happen. We're trying to stabilize the language, which _does_
require
breaking code in some cases, but we'd like to minimize that.
Backwards
compatible feature requests are more likely to make it in, but
even then, they
need very compelling use cases and are likely to be held back
by all of the
work that _needs_ to be done (new features may be nice, but
they're unlikely
to be necessary at this point). We're past the point where
we're freely
mucking with the language to try out new ideas but instead are
trying to
polish what we have.
But as Andrei says, there's tons of room for stuff to be done
on the library
front and plenty of work to do helping out with stuff like
documentation and
articles. So, there's tons for people to do to help out, and
there's certainly
plenty of innovation that could be done with regards to how
stuff is handled in
new stuff in the standard library. It's just the lanugage
itself where we're
limiting what innovation we put into it at this point.
- Jonathan M Davis
Well, Jonathan M Davis, I had posted a second response to
Andrei's first comment before reading either his second one or
yours. But I think I pretty much explained my position, for
better or worse. It's not so much not having the feature included
so much as wanting to know why because despite Andrei's clear
intelligence and good intentions, I felt pretty strongly that I
had put onto the table something very good.
