C++ launched its community survey, too

[jmh530]

On Tuesday, 27 February 2018 at 18:42:20 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> [snip]
> Well, OK, there *have* been backward-incompatible changes in 
> the C++ standard (I experienced some myself just these past 2 
> weeks while updating an old C++98 project of mine... which was 
> also motivation for ditching C++ completely and migrating the 
> whole codebase to D).  But you're not going to see the sort of 
> fundamental change that will fix some of the longstanding 
> inherent design problems with C++, because that would mean 
> alienating the majority of existing C++ projects out there. 
> Even if the C++ committee went ahead with such a revision, it 
> will surely not fly: nobody will want to implement it.

The economic way of thinking is to consider whether the marginal 
benefit of a breaking change on all future code and whether that 
would exceed the marginal cost of a breaking change requiring old 
projects to be re-written. As most of us recognize, if the amount 
of old code that needs to be re-written is large and the cost of 
re-writing it is high, then it would overwhelm any changes of 
little benefit. Thus, I'm not sure this resistance to 
backward-incompatible changes is something all that specific to 
C++. I would guess that if D were as popular as C++, then the 
rational thing to do would be to be slow moving and be very 
careful about making costly breaking changes.