Lang.NEXT panel

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On 6/12/14, 10:40 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On 6/10/2014 12:35 PM, justme wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 4 June 2014 at 06:13:39 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> Of possible interest.
>>> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/278twt/panel_systems_programming_in_2014_and_beyond/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Andrei
>>
>> IMHO, the coolest thing was when Rob Pike told about the tool they made
>> for automatically upgrading user source code to their next language
>> version.
>>
>> That should be quite easy to implement now in D, and once done, would
>> give much needed room for breaking changes we feel should be done. Pike
>> seemed to be extremely satisfied they did it.
>
> Personally, I wouldn't be comfortable trusting such a tool. Besides, I
> find that upgrading a codebase to a newer language version is one of the
> most trivial tasks I ever face in software development - even in D.
>
> It's a cute trick, but not a worthwhile use of development resources.

I very much think the opposite, drawing from many years of hacking into 
large codebases. I'm completely with Rob here. On a large codebase, even 
the slightest manual or semi-manual change is painstaking to plan and 
execute, and almost always suffers of human errors.

I got convinced a dfix tool would be a strategic component of D's 
offering going forward.


Andrei