is it possible to learn D(2)?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/18/10 3:44 PM, Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
> On 12/18/2010 03:16 PM, Don wrote:
>> Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
>>> D2 has *never* been officially released (like D1 was), though its
>>> release was supposed to coincide with the release of Andrei's book.
>>
>> Where did you get that idea? I've never heard it before.
>> (Genuine question, I'd like to know where that impression came from).
>
> Which idea are you questioning? That D2 hasn't been "released", or that
> the two were supposed to come out together? The answer to both would be
> the newsgroup.
>
> There was plenty of talk about them coming out together, and then time
> went by, and Andrei's book was relatively quietly released (unless I
> missed some big announcement; my memory was of posts trickling in of
> people who had pre-ordered), and no mention was made of D2 being
> released any more along with the book.
>
> I can dig up posts if you like, but I'd rather not unless any of this is
> in dispute.

I don't think it's worth investigating this, but at any rate my thinking 
has been that finalizing TDPL would finalize the specification of D2. Of 
course, ideally the compiler would follow the specification as closely 
as possible, but with the number of extant issues it has always been 
pretty clear that conformance will be trailing.

The book hasn't been released quietly at all; I've sent numerous updates 
to this group (just search for TDPL in the title) and my website has 
made the event as prominent as it could. As it was clearly highly 
anticipated in this group, laying it any thicker would have been 
inappropriate.

>>> Walter and Andrei haven't been very honest in their presentations on
>>> the state of the language.
>>
>> I think the initial estimate of how long things would take was wildly
>> optimistic. I am certain that there's been no intention to be dishonest,
>> at any stage.
>
> Andrei gives other people a lot of shit over only showing the positive
> in their presentations. Both Andrei and Walter have misrepresented the
> open source compiler issues on their slides (and Walter had no excuse
> after Andrei was called for it on the newsgroup).
>
> I saw Andrei's Google presentation and he talked a lot about D2 features
> and gave away a lot of books, but never once said that D2 was still
> being implemented and that serious bugs remained.

A fair point. Well I didn't give away "a lot" of books, I gave three, 
and specifically for the three most embarrassing questions. (My budget 
of giveaway books is fairly limited.) Another thing would be that I tend 
to focus on language power, because that's perennial, and consider 
implementation bugs something transitory. As of today I can't offhand 
think of a feature in TDPL that we don't know how to implement in D, and 
that topic is important.


Andrei