On * Language Design

Bane branimir.milosavljevic at gmail.com
Sat Mar 13 13:45:15 PST 2010


> > Interesting point in chapter Evolution vs. Stability. Maybe v2 came to fast, before v1 became popular?
> 
> The naming of D1 vs D2 is a bit misleading. v1 was actually a fairly 
> arbitrary snapshot of the development of D, to create a stable branch. 
> There was absolutely no pause in language developement.
> D2 is completely different. It's a fully planned release.

>From the article:

"...Having said that, the advantages to stopping with 1.0 are huge. Here’s why: one of the main success factors for a new XML language is how much software there is out there that does useful things with it. (See my proposed restatement of Metcalfe’s law over in the companion piece.) And software developers love a stable target above all things. If you publish 1.0 of your language and are fortunate enough to get some uptake in the developer community so some useful tools are shipping, bear in mind that if you then release 2.0, you’ve quite likely broken all those tools. You can maybe do this once before the developers are going to start seeing you as part of the problem rather than as part of the solution. They might just give up on you, or they might decide to go on maintaining their 1.0-compatible releases and simply ignore your 2.0, which will then likely go un-used. This is more or less exactly what happened to XML 1.1 which, despite having my name on the cover, I thought was a bad idea and fought every step of the way..."

Just found some truth in all said above. Luckuly, difference between D1 and D2 isn't that great (I hope)....



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