About Andrei's interview, part 3

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, August 25, 2010 17:27:41 Ben White wrote:
> ... There's no incompatible D3 in the foreseeable future ...
> 
> but then I bummed.

We need D2 to completely and totally stable before we even consider anything 
like D3. If you don't properly stabilize what you have and let it mature, it's 
not likely to get used much. And as much as new features can be great, breaking 
backwards compatibility can suck too. Not to mention, I think that D2 needs to 
be used a lot more by a lot more people before we could really know what was 
done right and what was done wrong such that we would really know what to do 
with D3.

By the sounds of it, once D2 is more mature and stable, some backwards-
compatible features may be added, but we don't really need D3 at this point. D2 
is a huge gain over D1, and it was well worth breaking backwards compatability 
for it, but it's not like D1 hase ever all that much traction. There are 
definitely people who use it, but it has a relatively small user base. If D2's 
user base really increases like we'd like it to (and TDPL should help a lot with 
that), it's going to cost users a lot more when backwards compatability is 
broken.

There may very well be a D3 someday, but D2 is still pretty nascent. We need to 
get what we have properly mature before we look at doing a major language 
rewrite.

- Jonathan M Davis