On Saturday, 16 July 2016 at 21:35:41 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 7/16/2016 6:09 AM, Andrew Godfrey wrote:
Walter called Prolog "singularly useless". You have been
referring to changes
that would amount to a new major version of D as "a cleanup".
From the forums,
my sense is that there IS a groundswell of opinion, that D2
has some major
mistakes in it that can't be rectified without doing a D3, and
there's a strong
reaction to that idea based on experience with D1 -> D2.
Perhaps what is needed
is a separate area for discussion about ideas that would
require a major version
change. The thing about that is that it can't be done
incrementally; it's the
rare kind of thing that would need to be planned long in
advance, and would have
to amount to a huge improvement to justify even considering it.
I agree that D2 has made some fundamental mistakes. But it also
got a great deal right.
I haven't banned Ola from the forums, he has done nothing to
deserve that. He's welcome to post here, and others are welcome
to engage him.
I'm more interested in engaging on "in how many years will the D
leadership be interested in engaging on the topic of D3?" I feel
this is a significant omission from the vision doc, and that
omission inflames a lot of the recurring animosity I see on the
forums. Even an answer of "never" would be a significant
improvement over "we refuse to engage on that". And I doubt
you're really thinking "never".
I do think that ideas from academia will mostly cause a lot of
unwanted noise in such a discussion - because academia, in my
experience, is more focused on "software construction" than on
"software evolution", and D takes an approach that is built on
practical experience with evolution. But academia also has
occasional nuggets of extreme value.
