@property - take it behind the woodshed and shoot it?

Jonathan M Davis jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Thu Jan 24 13:26:11 PST 2013


On Thursday, January 24, 2013 22:06:02 mist wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 January 2013 at 21:00:32 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
> 
> wrote:
> > On 1/24/13 3:58 PM, mist wrote:
> >> Really, all this backwards-compatibility talk is a crap.
> > 
> > There's just a lot of evidence that suggests the contrary.
> > Clearly we don't want or like to be conservative, but
> > apparently we need to.
> > 
> > Andrei
> 
> Do you read and answer only to the first sentence? Can you
> honestly say "D design is rock solid and correct, we will never
> be required to make any backwards-incompatible change"?
> 
> If you check those evidences, it was never breaking code alone.
> It was breaking code AND lack of any sane process that allows to
> stick with acceptable release version for longer time. And I
> suggest to fix the right thing, not freeze specs and hope all
> problems will fade themselves.

The problem is that we have competing goals that we have to deal with

1. Fix any problems in the language so that its design is solid.

2. Avoid breaking people's code.

If we don't do enough of #1, then D will have serious problems, but if we do 
too much of it, then we'll serious problems because with #2. Even if we end up 
with the perfect language when we're done, it doesn't matter much if no one's 
using it, and if we are forever breaking people's code, then they're not going 
to stick around. The trick is deciding when and how we need to and can get 
away with breaking code. And the longer it takes to solve major design flaws in 
the language which require breaking code, the more code we'll break when we do 
make the changes, and the more problems will have, which is one reason why 
it's so frustrating that it often takes quite a while to properly sort this 
sort of thing out.

- Jonathan M Davis


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