Help!

[Rob T]

On Tuesday, 27 November 2012 at 21:23:12 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>
> I understand what you're saying, but the counterpoint is we 
> lost half the D community when D2 broke D1 code. We still have 
> at least one major D1 user that still finds it impractical to 
> upgrade to D2.
>
> It is unbelievably frustrating for people to have their code 
> break with each new release, have older projects all 
> invalidated, with few willing to do the maintenance work to 
> bring them back on line.

It may not be my place to say, but the unwillingness to maintain 
the D1 code seems to go well past just breakage issues.

Anyway, I figure D at this time is attracting mostly "early 
adopters" who don't always mind the odd breakage here and there 
so long as it's for the greater good. Once the D base expands 
beyond the early adopter phase, change will become much more 
difficult than it is right now, so whatever is being done today 
better be done well before it's too late.

My only suggestion is to re-think how a programming language can 
remain reasonably stable, yet at the same time evolve forward in 
significant ways over the long term. There must be plenty of 
real-world examples of this being done successfully that can be 
emulated with D.

If D is not allowed to change in significant ways, then it will 
slowly but surely become another C/C++, with "significant" 
updates once every 10 years or so which are mediocre and leave 
the root design defects in place.

--rt