Vision for the D language - stabilizing complexity?

[Mathias Lang via Digitalmars-d]

2016-07-18 15:48 GMT+02:00 Andrew Godfrey via Digitalmars-d <
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com>:

>
> We risk scaring away potential community members, and alienating existing
> ones, by the way we say "no" to proposals for breaking changes. We could
> improve how we say "no", by having a place to point people to. Potential
> topics:
> [...]
>

I've never seen a definitive "No" to breaking changes.
We do breaking changes all the time. Did everyone already forget what the
latest release (2.071.0) was about ? Revamping the import system, one of
the core component of the language.
But it took a lot of time, and experience, to do it. It did deprecate
patterns people were using for a long time before (e.g. inheriting
imports), but its a (almost) consistent and principled implementation.

Way too often I see suggestions for a change with one (or more) of the
following mistakes:
- Want to bring a specific construct in the language rather than achieve a
goal
- Only consider the pros of such a proposal and completely skip any cons
analysis
- Focus on one single change without considering how it could affect the
whole language

But I've never seen someone willing to put the effort in a proposal to
improve the language be turned away.
In fact, our review process for language change was recently updated as
well to make it more accessible and save everyone's time. If it's not a
commitment for continuous improvement of the language, I don't know what it
is.
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