Scott Meyers' DConf 2014 keynote "The Last Thing D Needs"

Brian Rogoff via Digitalmars-d-announce digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com
Thu May 29 12:16:43 PDT 2014


On Thursday, 29 May 2014 at 18:52:53 UTC, Brian Schott wrote:
> On Thursday, 29 May 2014 at 18:12:10 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky 
> wrote:
>> And no, it doesn't matter how the current frontend implements 
>> it, because you can argue next to any decisions this way.
>
> When issues like this come up the spec is almost always changed 
> to match the DMD front end instead of the other way around.

I believe that the result of this policy will be that the D 
community will need to have Scott Meyers or someone like him to 
explain some of these issues. :-)

It may not be as bad as C++, but is that how we want to measure a 
language design? "Sure, it looks bad, but it could have been so 
much worse!"

> Why are we afraid of breaking code that relied on behavior that 
> was not in the language specification?

My guess is that the fear of 'breaking' some users' code is too 
great right now. That was one of the things I took from Meyers' 
talk; the D designers still have an opportunity to be bold in 
introducing changes that make the entire design better (more 
easily explainable) while in C++ that opportunity has probably 
passed.

> That makes it almost impossible to fix accepts-invalid bugs.

It's a problem that needs to be addressed. Thanks for your 
efforts and for continually reminding people. I really liked your 
lightning talk; it could have followed Meyers' and maybe the 
right people would have been shamed into action.



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