Does D have too many features?

[Maxim Fomin]

On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 18:48:18 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Andrei and I had a fun discussion last night about this 
> question. The idea was which features in D are redundant and/or 
> do not add significant value?
>
> A couple already agreed upon ones are typedef and the cfloat, 
> cdouble and creal types.
>
> What's your list?

I guess the underlying problem is inability to formulate the 
target state of the language with specified relations between 
different components. Being looking at the language since late 
2011 I found problematic to know the language as a whole. When a 
newcomer looks for information he either gets a common overview 
"native efficiency, ..." at dlang.org with (outdated) 
documentation or videos on youtube which explains how scope(xxx) 
beats exceptions and templates are superior to that in C++ and 
similar posts in the web, let alone toolchain lack complaints.

My comment was provoked mainly by 
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/vwpzirpppabcgylmvpsx@forum.dlang.org 
discussion (D3 idea).

You ask which features are redundant or not significant, but this 
depends on how features are integrated in the rest of language 
and without clear and completed vision there is no answer. And 
please remember, that each of D member has its own (biased) 
information about D and what to do. The language is moving and it 
is hard to reveal how any change will affect other components. 
Even if you found a particular item redundant there is no 
guarantee that the situation will not change in future.

Currently I (who looked for a language that combines C# 
"usability" and C performance) view D as a ship which sails in 
unknown direction with lots of holes (look at bugzilla proposals 
how to make a language) and what I found the most dreaded is that 
the direction of the ship movement today is determined by which 
hole was fixed yesterday.

So, you are free to ask ship's crew about what hole and how to 
fix and expect that it will tomorrow bring ship to a better 
place, but without final destination this brownian movement may 
theoretically last infinitely, but of course, in practice it will 
lead either to ship crashing, departure of sailors or finally 
targeting an unexpected place with unsatisfactory result.