DIP 1026---Deprecate Context-Sensitive String Literals---Community Review Round 1

[FeepingCreature]

On Tuesday, 3 December 2019 at 23:35:21 UTC, mipri wrote:
> 2. D's problem is "too many features" -> let's remove any
> feature that we can -> this DIP as step #1, remove something
> that looks relatively easy to remove.
>
> How much agreement do you think there is on the first point?
>
> Consider the "remove ~= from arrays" DIP. It removed a
> feature, and removing the feature arguably materially improved
> D's options to evolve as a language, and it got a really
> incensed negative response.
>

I think this is a really questionable argument, because it 
implicitly presumes that all features are worth the same. The 
"remove ~= from arrays" DIP got, as far as I could see, basically 
no feedback along the lines of "whatever, we use it but we could 
replace it easily" or "I think D doesn't need to reduce its 
feature set in general." The feedback it got was, as far as I 
could tell, overwhelmingly "this feature is a core component of 
the usefulness of the D language and definitely the *wrong place* 
to start removing things."

Logically speaking, the more people think it is the wrong place 
to start removing features, the less that debate says about 
removing features as a whole, because people were more motivated 
by the specific feature rather than the general state of the 
language.