D dropped in favour of C# for PSP emulator

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, May 17, 2012 18:00:40 bearophile wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu:
> > I agree binarySearch is more precise, but I also think it's a
> > minor issue not worth the cost of changing at this point.
> > Improving names of things in the standard library is a quest
> > that could go forever, make everybody happy we're making
> > progress, and achieve no substantial gain.
> 
> Names are very important, they are the fist and most important
> part of an API, they are the first handle for human programmers
> and their minds. The amount of care Python development group
> gives to the choice of names is visible and it makes a difference
> in Python usability.
> Important names can't be chosen by a single person, because
> single persons have quirks (they overstate how much common a word
> or concept is, etc etc). So important names are better chosen by
> groups, that allow to average out those quirks.
> I suggest to stick somewhere inside Phobos a name like
> "binarySearch".

Yes, names are important, but you'll also never get people to agree on them. 
They're a classic bikeshedding issue. Unless a name is patently bad, if 
changing it is going to break code, then you usually shouldn't change it - not 
when we're talking about a public API (_especially_ when it's the standard 
library of a language). All of the changes that we made to make Phobos' 
function names actually follow Phobos' official naming conventions were 
disruptive enough as it is.

We're really trying to read language and library stability, so breaking 
changes need greater and greater justification for them to be worth it, and 
simply renaming a function generally isn't going to cut it anymore - not 
without a _very_ good reason.

- Jonathan M Davis