On Wednesday, 22 May 2013 at 14:09:57 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
This is _exactly_ the mindset I am trying to fight with. I have had an unpleasant experience of working in typical enterprise environment for few years and there is quite a strong attitude about this - no one cares about reasons for code breakage. For those who care about breakage, it is a boolean flag - either breaks, or not.
I think this is a mindset that needs to die. Consider why someone would choose to use D.
D provides an improved experience over the language being used. How did D achieve this? It was by being one big breaking change. Everyone using D is reaping benefits from D choosing that it will not compile all C code.
So while people claim they don't want breaking change, what they really mean is "I only want breaking change when I decide I to take it." And each person/situation will have different desire on what they wish to have broken. What we want is to select changes that people will want, make it easy to make/expect the changes, and enough time they will make the choice on their own.
D is stabilizing and is stable enough for many. We want to make progress in that direction, we don't want to just halt development like was done at D1. We have been making it less painful to upgrade and that effort should continue and doesn't need to be through a "no breaking changes" mandate.
