On Monday, 18 July 2016 at 18:03:49 UTC, Mathias Lang wrote:
2016-07-18 15:48 GMT+02:00 Andrew Godfrey via Digitalmars-d <
digitalmars-d@puremagic.com>:
I've never seen a definitive "No" to breaking changes.
We do breaking changes all the time. Did everyone already
forget what the
latest release (2.071.0) was about ? Revamping the import
system, one of
the core component of the language.
But it took a lot of time, and experience, to do it. It did
deprecate
patterns people were using for a long time before (e.g.
inheriting
imports), but its a (almost) consistent and principled
implementation.
Although it can be a PITA, people accept breaking changes, if
they really make sense.
Way too often I see suggestions for a change with one (or more)
of the
following mistakes:
- Want to bring a specific construct in the language rather
than achieve a
goal
- Only consider the pros of such a proposal and completely skip
any cons
analysis
- Focus on one single change without considering how it could
affect the
whole language
That's also my impression. Given that D is open source I'm
surprised that nobody has grabbed it and come up with a prototype
of D3 or whatever. How else could you prove your case? After all
the onus of proof is on the one who proposes a change. Don't just
sit and wait until Walter says "Go ahead", knowing full well that
the core devs are in no position to dedicate time to D3 at the
moment - that's too easy and it gets us nowhere.
But I've never seen someone willing to put the effort in a
proposal to
improve the language be turned away.
In fact, our review process for language change was recently
updated as
well to make it more accessible and save everyone's time. If
it's not a
commitment for continuous improvement of the language, I don't
know what it
is.
