Evolving the D Language

[jmh530]

On Friday, 7 July 2023 at 10:45:33 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> On Friday, 7 July 2023 at 09:35:14 UTC, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
>>
>> I respectfully disagree, and prefer to keep going on with the 
>> current deprecation and cleanup policy: Scott Meyers' DConf 
>> 2014 keynote all the way down.
>
> +1
>
> I've always agreed with the deprecation in the end, even 
> complex numbers.
> alias this was a relatively bad idea, even if an iconic feature.
> I don't remember people from outside the community being 
> impressed by alias this.
> We have the right to backtrack on bad ideas instead of keeping 
> them forever.
> [snip]

The question is whether there is a migration path. If they 
removed functionality that didn't have a good foundation and put 
it on one with a better foundation, then I think people would 
have been ok (like removing Complex numbers was annoying, but 
std.complex exists or you can write your own).

The current approach had a lot going for it. I'm sympathetic to 
those who favor being strict by default, but I don't feel 
strongly as I'm not really sure what I think about Hipreme's 
comment about how this all interacts with dependencies. If the 
new switches could turn deprecation errors into warnings or hide 
depreciation errors/warnings, then that might be a good 
complement to the revert switch (revert with a version number is 
also an interesting idea).