On Monday, 18 July 2016 at 09:45:39 UTC, Chris wrote:
On Sunday, 17 July 2016 at 02:17:52 UTC, Andrew Godfrey wrote:
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.
The question is what is D3 supposed to be? I'm neither for nor
against D3, it pops up every once in a while when people are
not happy with a feature. My questions are:
1. Is there any clear vision of what D3 should look like?
2. What exactly will it fix?
3. Is there a prototype (in progress) to actually prove it will
fix those things?
4. If there is (real) proof[1], would it justify a break with
D2 and risk D's death?
I think this topic is too serious to be just throwing in
(partly academic) ideas that might or might not work in the
real world. It's too serious to use D as a playground and later
say "Ah well, it didn't work. [shrug]". D has left the
playground and can no longer afford to just play around with
ideas randomly. One has to be realistic.
I'd also like to add that if we had a "clean and compact" D3,
it would become more complex over time and people would want D4
to solve this, then D5 and so forth. I haven't seen any
software yet that hasn't become more complex over time.
Last but not least, it would help to make a list of the things
D2 got right to put the whole D3 issue into proportion.
[1] I.e. let's not refer to other languages in an eclectic
manner. I'm asking for a proof that D works as D3 and is
superior to D2.
We risk scaring away potential community members, and alienating
existing ones, by the way we say "no" to proposals for breaking
changes. We could improve how we say "no", by having a place to
point people to. Potential topics:
1) As you say, a vision for D3. Maybe just a summary of the
things that are now agreed upon, e.g. autodecoding (though even
there, I think the details of where to move to, are still
contentious. E.g. I personally dislike the convention of "char"
meaning a 1-byte data type but I think some others like it).
2) The case against incremental breaking changes. (I see this
argument somewhat, though it applies less to "dfixable" breaking
changes).
3) Why we feel that breaking changes risk killing D outright. (I
just don't see it. I wonder if we're confusing "dfixable"
breaking changes, with other more disruptive kinds (such as
Tango=>Phobos).)
