Flag proposal

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 6/10/11 8:31 PM, bearophile wrote:
> Andrei:
>
>> I'd love to see more evidence to this claim.
>
> Right :-)
>
>
>> Interesting work became possible after it became clear to everyone
>> that the language is now given, so it's time to use what's there.
>
> If you want to build stable large frameworks and libraries then
> having a "stable" (backwards compatible) language helps. But in this
> thread we are only talking about additive changes.

Don't kid yourself. Every additive change creates more precedent and 
more reason to refuse thinking creatively within the language. It also 
means the language and its fostered idioms are a moving target.

> And C#/Python show
> abundant code written even while C# was adding generics, dynamic,
> named arguments, and many other things (and C#5 will add more
> things), and the same has happened to Python too, since several
> years. Python is just out of a design hiatus meant to help other
> Python implementations catch up, and now new design ideas are
> discussed again. In D syntax sugar for tuple unpacking is useful for
> library programmers too.

I think these languages are at a different point in their evolution than 
D. We still don't have a strong answer to "what are the largest apps 
written in D" and this is because many people with an interest in the 
language are paralyzed in analysis. I know the phenomenon: after you 
spend a lot discussing designs, it is downright frightening to commit to 
one.


Andrei