Final by default?

[Sarath Kodali]

On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 00:40:34 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev 
wrote:
>
> Doesn't this sort of seal the language's fate in the long run, 
> though? Eventually, new programming languages will appear which 
> will learn from D's mistakes, and no new projects will be 
> written in D.

It won't happen that way if we evolve D such that it won't break 
existing code. Or manages it with long deprecation cycles. In 
1989, ANSI C had come up with new function style without breaking 
old function style. After a while the new style has become the 
standard and the compilers gave warning messages. In D, we can 
issue "deprecated" messages.

>
> Wasn't it here that I heard that a language which doesn't 
> evolve is a dead language?
>
> From looking at the atmosphere in this newsgroup, at least to 
> me it appears obvious that there are, in fact, D users who 
> would be glad to have their D code broken if it means that it 
> will end up being written in a better programming language. 
> (I'm one of them, for the record; I regularly break my own code 
> anyway when refactoring my library.) Although I'm not 
> advocating forking off a D3 here and now, the list of things we 
> wish we could fix is only going to grow.

That is true if your code is under active development. What if 
you had a production code that was written 2 years back?

- Sarath