Dicebot on leaving D: It is anarchy driven development in all its glory.

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Saturday, 25 August 2018 at 10:52:04 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Friday, 24 August 2018 at 19:26:40 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 8/24/2018 6:04 AM, Chris wrote:
>>> For about a year I've had the feeling that D is moving too 
>>> fast and going nowhere at the same time. D has to slow down 
>>> and get stable. D is past the experimental stage. Too many 
>>> people use it for real world programming and programmers 
>>> value and _need_ both stability and consistency.
>>
>> Every programmer who says this also demands new (and breaking) 
>> features.
>
> "Every programmer who..." Really? Sorry, but this is not an 
> answer. The fact remains that D is in danger of becoming 
> unusable for real world programming. Earlier this year I had to 
> "unearth" old Python code from 2009 (some parts of the code 
> were even older). And you know what? It still worked! The same 
> goes for Java code I wrote for Java 1.5. If you want to achieve 
> something similar with D you have to write code that is 
> basically C code, i.e. you shouldn't use any of the nicer or 
> more advanced features, because they might break with the next 
> dmd release - which kind of defeats the purpose.
>
> Also, a. adding new features doesn't necessarily mean that old 
> code has to stop working and b. the last breaking change I 
> would've supported was to get rid of autodecode, but that was 
> never done and now it seems too late, yet it would have been a 
> change of utmost importance because string handling is 
> everywhere these days. But maybe it would have been too much 
> tedious work and no real intellectual challenge, so why bother. 
> Other languages do bother, however.
>
> You may brush our concerns aside with a throw away comment like 
> the one above, but I'm not the only one who doesn't consider D 
> for serious stuff anymore. As has been said before, none of the 
> problems are unfixable - but if your answer is indicative of 
> the D leadership's attitude towards concerned (longtime) users, 
> then don't be surprised that we go back to Java and other 
> languages that offer more stability.
>
> I still have maximum respect for everything you, Andrei and the 
> community have achieved. But please don't throw it all away now.


And yet some of the heaviest users of D have said in public 
'please break our code".  I wonder why that could be.

It's also not terribly surprising that D2 code from 2009 doesn't 
always compile when you consider the release date of the language.

Do you think it's a bad thing that imports were fixed, for 
example?  That broke a lot of old code.

"If you want to achieve
> something similar with D you have to write code that is 
> basically C code, i.e. you shouldn't use any of the nicer or 
> more advanced features, because they might break with the next 
> dmd release - which kind of defeats the purpose.
"

I don't think this is true.  Have slices, arrays, associative 
arrays and so on broken ?  On the other hand D written like C 
that didn't get the imports right would have broken when the 
module system was corrected.  This is a good thing.

>
> "Every programmer who..." Really? Sorry, but this is not an 
> answer. The fact remains that D is in danger of becoming 
> unusable for real world programming."

I don't think this is true either.  It doesn't fit with my own 
experience and it doesn't fit with the growing enterprise 
adoption.  That may be your personal perspective, but it's really 
hard to put yourself in the shoes of somebody in a very different 
situation that you have never encountered.

There's intrinsically a tradeoff between different kinds of 
problems.

Nassim Taleb writes about hormesis.  I'm not sure that breakage 
of a non-serious kind is necessarily terrible.  It might be 
terrible for you personally - that's not for me to judge.  But it 
has the effect of building capabilities that have value in other 
ways.

There are quite a few different sorts of concerns raised on this 
thread and they are linked by how people feel not by logic.  I 
have a lot of respect for Shachar technically but I personally 
found the way he expressed his point of view a bit odd and 
unlikely to be effective in achieving whatever it is his goal 
was, also bearing in mind he doesn't speak for Weka.

It might be helpful to go through the concerns and organise them 
based on logical ordering because an outburst of emotion won't 
translate in itself into any kind of solution.