On Thursday, June 02, 2016 09:06:44 Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d wrote: > Meanwhile, I go to conferences. Train and consult at large companies. > Dozens every year, cumulatively thousands of people. I talk about D and > ask people what it would take for them to use the language. Invariably I > hear a surprisingly small number of reasons:
Are folks going to not start using D because of auto-decoding? No, because they won't know anything about it. Many of them don't even know anything about ranges. But it _will_ result in a WTF moment for pretty much everyone. It happens all the time and results in plenty of questions on D.Learn and stackoverflow, because no one expects it, and it causes them problems. Can we sanely remove auto-decoding from Phobos? I don't know. It's entrenched enough that doing so without breaking code is going to be very difficult. But at minimum, we need to mitigate it's effects, and I'm sure that we're going to be sorry in the long run if we don't figure out how to actually excise it. It's already a major wart that causes frequent problems, and it's the sort of thing that's going to make a number of folks unhappy with D in the long run, even if you can convince them to switch to it now while auto-decoding is still in place. Will it make them unhappy enough to switch away from D? Probably not. But it is going to be a constant pain point of the sort that folks frequently complain about with C++ - only this is one that we'll have, and C++ won't. - Jonathan M Davis
