D versionning

[SomeDude]

On Sunday, 15 July 2012 at 20:44:01 UTC, Patrick Stewart wrote:
>> OTOH, it may break the community yet again, which we certainly 
>> don't want, probably even less than breaking code.
>> Also, the example of Python with two main stable branches that 
>> live in parallel is not very encouraging.
>
> Are you kidding? Python should be used as example of how 
> software should be engineered. They keep release schedules, 
> keep stable versions & never break backward compatibility 
> without giving their users ways to not be stuck in bad 
> situation. It is well thought and planned. Its popularity and 
> widespread is not a coincidence,  and the fact that it became 
> de facto part of linuxes (shipping with 5 year old versions 
> without a fear of deprecation) just proves people can count on 
> it and use it without fear of some random unguided development 
> that is typical of D with its half thought our new features 
> that bite it on the ass year later.

I understand your gripe with breaking changes and bugs, but your 
painting of the sate of things is caricatural. First Linuxes are 
not shipping with 5 year old versions of Python, they usually 
ship with 2.7 which is the last version of the 2 branch. 
Meanwhile, the 3 branch is having a hard time getting used, 
several years after its introduction, and some major packages 
still haven't been ported.
http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3
That is what I was referring to.

I agree the Python roadmap is better paved than the D roadmap, 
which hardly exists. It does make a case for a dev and a stable 
branch, which makes complete sense. OTOH, Python has suffered 
from disruptive changes just as much as D, like the fact that 
incorporating UTF in the language has justified a completely new 
branch. And talking about half assed features, its reference 
implementation suffers from *major* issues, like being slow 
(about 5 times slower than the Pypy JIT implementation) and 
monothreaded. And that is not going to be fixed any time soon. 
And you can't use PyPy for most serious web projects as native 
libraries are not compatible and haven't been ported.