Phobos - breaking existing code

Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Fri Nov 28 18:35:14 PST 2014


On 11/28/2014 5:57 PM, bearophile wrote:
> Walter Bright:
>> 1. renaming things to the latest fashion is an illusion of progress, not
>> actual progress, such as fnmatch => globMatch
> You are wrong. Having good function names is extremely important. Renaming badly
> named things with more clear and more meaningful names reduces pain for both old
> and new users, reduces coding time, and in some cases even avoids some troubles.

That's largely speculation. I doubt there's an objective case that "globMatch" 
is superior to "fnmatch". Not only that, "fnmatch" is a familiar and widely used 
name across diverse languages. Nobody else uses "globMatch".

And all these speculative benefits need to be set against the real costs of 
nothing compiles that is 2+ years old, the annoyed users, the people who got 
tired of constant code breakage and left, and the lack of a rich set of 
libraries because of bit rot.



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