On Friday, 24 August 2018 at 19:26:40 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 8/24/2018 6:04 AM, Chris wrote:
For about a year I've had the feeling that D is moving too
fast and going nowhere at the same time. D has to slow down
and get stable. D is past the experimental stage. Too many
people use it for real world programming and programmers value
and _need_ both stability and consistency.
Every programmer who says this also demands new (and breaking)
features.
"Every programmer who..." Really? Sorry, but this is not an
answer. The fact remains that D is in danger of becoming unusable
for real world programming. Earlier this year I had to "unearth"
old Python code from 2009 (some parts of the code were even
older). And you know what? It still worked! The same goes for
Java code I wrote for Java 1.5. If you want to achieve something
similar with D you have to write code that is basically C code,
i.e. you shouldn't use any of the nicer or more advanced
features, because they might break with the next dmd release -
which kind of defeats the purpose.
Also, a. adding new features doesn't necessarily mean that old
code has to stop working and b. the last breaking change I
would've supported was to get rid of autodecode, but that was
never done and now it seems too late, yet it would have been a
change of utmost importance because string handling is everywhere
these days. But maybe it would have been too much tedious work
and no real intellectual challenge, so why bother. Other
languages do bother, however.
You may brush our concerns aside with a throw away comment like
the one above, but I'm not the only one who doesn't consider D
for serious stuff anymore. As has been said before, none of the
problems are unfixable - but if your answer is indicative of the
D leadership's attitude towards concerned (longtime) users, then
don't be surprised that we go back to Java and other languages
that offer more stability.
I still have maximum respect for everything you, Andrei and the
community have achieved. But please don't throw it all away now.
