Vision for the D language - stabilizing complexity?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 14 July 2016 at 13:26:06 UTC, Chris wrote:
> Such a language will never see the light of day.

Many such languages exist.

> What makes a language attractive is that you can actually use 
> it - here and now.

What makes a language attractive is that it has system support 
and provides solutions that save time. That's what languages like 
TypeScript, Python, C#, Java, Swift and Go attractive.

I follow several languages that are very attractive, but that I 
cannot use because they don't have system support. I am also 
using languages that are less attractive than the alternatives 
for the same reasons.

>> Of course, the first thing you ought to do is to look at 
>> existing knowhow related to language design.
>
> Which is what D did.

No, it did not build on existing knowhow in language design 
theory, it was a fair reinterpretation of the C++ programming 
model with a tiny bit of Pythonesque extensions.

> ... which, in fairness, where never meant to be carefully 
> designed languages. Just convenient hacks for everyday tasks.

Perl and Php started as small and convenient scripting languages, 
but they were predominantly evolved in an iterative fashion for 
decades after that, and aggregated a lot of issues related to 
exactly iterative evolution.

Both C++ and D shows clear signs of their abstraction mechanisms 
not fitting well with the core language. Too many mechanisms, not 
generic enough. And that happened because significant changes 
came late in the process, after deployment. You can say the same 
thing about Go and error-handling, it sticks out like a sore 
thumb.