Final by default?

[Abdulhaq]

On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 18:03:42 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> On 3/13/14, Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> 
> wrote:
>> There must be a way to convey that a decision has been made. 
>> It is
>> understood it won't please everybody, just like going the 
>> other way
>> won't please everybody. Please let me know what that way is.
>
> Voting.

Good programming languages have a coherent design, orthogonal 
features, a clean philosophy, approach... they subscribe to 
chosen programming models such as procedural, functional, 
message-passing, garbage collected, dynamically typed, strongly 
typed.... as the designer intended. Having a 'they who shout the 
loudest win' or even a voting system destroys that coherency and 
uniform philsophy IMHO. I don't bother with C++ because I read 
Herb Sutter's GOTW column from time and time and think to myself 
"I don't want to need to know all these very subtle issues and 
gotchas in my programming language". The syntax etc. of C++ I can 
cope with. Now, I think that Andrei and Walter are D's best 
chance to shepherd D away from the C++ gotcha morass. Voting on 
features to change / add would throw D into it. In my view adding 
features is particularly pernicious as they complicate the 
language in non-orthogonal ways leading to the need to know a 
broader and more complex language than necessary.