On Wednesday, 22 May 2013 at 14:37:10 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
On Wednesday, 22 May 2013 at 14:09:57 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
no one cares about reasons for code breakage. For those who
care about breakage, it is a boolean flag - either breaks, or
not.
This may well be the case, but you're missing the point:
Breakage is always bad, so we avoid it *unless* the change adds
some significant value to the language.
Fixing a bug (almost) always adds significant value.
Changing command line syntax, in my opinion (and, it would
appear, Walter and Andrei's) does not add significant value.
Although each individual person who suffers breakage may not
care why it happened, this does not in any way constitute an
argument for allowing less important changes to break stuff.
You seem to misunderstand what angers me and Jacob here. It is
not the fact that this specific DIP is rejected (I don't really
care), it is the fact that D developers keep repeating "D goes
stable" mantra when it actually does not. Pretending to
prioritize stability and breaking code even with bug fixes is
technically lying. Bad for reputation, bad for marketing. And
good luck using "They have a different understanding of
stability" line in a dialog with enterprise type manager.
If stability is really a priority - please start doing something
real about it. At least start with defining what "stability"
means and what guarantees D team can give for users. Publish it
at dlang.org and it is at least a start.
Or stop rejecting stuff using "stability" as smoke screen. This
two options exclude each other.
