Blog post: What D got wrong

[RazvanN]

On Thursday, 13 December 2018 at 10:14:45 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
> On Thursday, 13 December 2018 at 09:40:45 UTC, RazvanN wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 11 December 2018 at 10:45:39 UTC, Atila Neves 
>> wrote:
>>> A few things that have annoyed me about writing D lately:
>>>
>>> https://atilanevesoncode.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/what-d-got-wrong/
>>
>> That was a really good blog post, however I am strongly 
>> against the following sentence:
>>
>> "I think there’s a general consensus that @safe, pure and 
>> immutable should be default."
>>
>> It's not at all a general consensus and doing this would 
>> literally break all the existing D code. Without discussing 
>> all the technical aspects, this will severely impact the 
>> adoption rate of D because it will make it very complicated 
>> for people coming from a C/C++/Java background to accommodate 
>> with the language. In addition, this is completely against D's 
>> liberal philosophy where you can program however you want.
>
> My impression is that it's a consensus that it _should_, but 
> it's not going to happen due to breaking existing code.
>
>> this will severely impact the adoption rate of D because it 
>> will make it very complicated for people coming from a 
>> C/C++/Java background to accommodate with the language
>
> How? Rust has immutable and safe by default and it's doing fine.
>
D and Rust are competing to get the C/C++/Java/Python market 
share. In order to do that they should make it simple for 
developers to convert to the new language. Due to its design, 
Rust is insanely hard to master, which on the long run I think 
will kill the language despite of the advantages it offers. On 
the other side, consider die hard C fans: they are willing to 
accept the possibility of a buffer overflow simply because they 
want more power. Do you honestly think that they will ever take D 
into account if @safe and immutable data will be the default?

>> this is completely against D's liberal philosophy where you 
>> can program however you want.
>
> It would be if the change weren't accompanied by adding 
> `impure` and some sort of mutable auto. @system already exists. 
> It's a question of opting out (like with variable 
> initialisation) instead of opting in.

It still is, because the user is imposed to work in certain 
conditions that some might not want to.