The Case Against Autodecode

[Jack Stouffer via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 12 May 2016 at 20:15:45 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Here are some that are not matters of opinion.

If you're serious about removing auto-decoding, which I think you 
and others have shown has merits, you have to the THE SIMPLEST 
migration path ever, or you will kill D. I'm talking a simple 
press of a button.

I'm not exaggerating here. Python, a language which was much more 
popular than D at the time, came out with two versions in 2008: 
Python 2.7 which had numerous unicode problems, and Python 3.0 
which fixed those problems. Almost eight years later, and Python 
2 is STILL the more popular version despite Py3 having five major 
point releases since and Python 2 only getting security patches. 
Think the tango vs phobos problem, only a little worse.

D is much less popular now than was Python at the time, and 
Python 2 problems were more straight forward than the 
auto-decoding problem.  You'll need a very clear migration path, 
years long deprecations, and automatic tools in order to make the 
transition work, or else D's usage will be permanently damaged.