On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 00:40:34 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev
wrote:
Doesn't this sort of seal the language's fate in the long run,
though? Eventually, new programming languages will appear which
will learn from D's mistakes, and no new projects will be
written in D.
It won't happen that way if we evolve D such that it won't break
existing code. Or manages it with long deprecation cycles. In
1989, ANSI C had come up with new function style without breaking
old function style. After a while the new style has become the
standard and the compilers gave warning messages. In D, we can
issue "deprecated" messages.
Wasn't it here that I heard that a language which doesn't
evolve is a dead language?
From looking at the atmosphere in this newsgroup, at least to
me it appears obvious that there are, in fact, D users who
would be glad to have their D code broken if it means that it
will end up being written in a better programming language.
(I'm one of them, for the record; I regularly break my own code
anyway when refactoring my library.) Although I'm not
advocating forking off a D3 here and now, the list of things we
wish we could fix is only going to grow.
That is true if your code is under active development. What if
you had a production code that was written 2 years back?
- Sarath
