Deprecated Library Functions / Methods

[Chris]

Thank you all for taking my input seriously. I do appreciate it. 
I can understand both "parties", but I think not breaking code is 
more important than the ideal of a clean library. The reality of 
coding is (as we all know) that programmers cannot constantly 
update their code, because there are other more urgent things to 
be done (bug fixes, new modules etc.). I think it is not fair to 
accuse a programmer of carelessness simply because s/he didn't 
have time to check all the deprecation warnings in the library. 
And from a marketing point of view it's never a good idea to put 
off users by telling them "Ah don't complain, it's your own 
fault, you simply weren't careful enough!"

Also, the existence of deprecated methods doesn't encourage me 
(or others, as far as I know) to keep on using them forever. What 
usually happens is that when I start to write new code, I use the 
new methods as soon as they are available (no matter which 
language I use), and once I am familiar with them, I can step by 
step replace the old deprecated methods with the new ones. So, 
the reason I wanted to use the latest version of D was exactly 
because I wanted to use the new methods. But what happened was 
that I could not use the new methods, because I had to use an 
older version of D, yet I didn't want to write new code using 
deprecated methods. I got stuck properly.

I think ideals have to be adjusted to the reality of coding and 
not vice versa. I do want to keep on using D as it solved a lot 
of problems for me and I will update my code once things have 
calmed down.