Generality creep

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 03:09:53PM -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 3/28/19 2:56 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 02:30:24PM -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > [...]
> > > We've been worrying too much about changing things.
> > 
> > Wow.  That's a pretty drastic (and refreshing!) change of stance
> > from the past years of insisting that we should do our utmost to
> > maintain backward compatibility.  I, for one, welcome this change.
> 
> Thanks. The irony of it all is that adding new stuff and leaving the
> old stuff in maintenance mode is simultaneously the rock-solid
> compatibility stance and the ultimate road to progress.

But if that's the case, the stuff in maintenance mode should at least
receive maintenance fixes of the kind being proposed for RefRange?
Let's agree that RefRange was a bad idea and all that.  But there are
users using it that need fixes for the issues they encountered.  Even if
said fixes are perhaps also just as bad of an idea as RefRange itself
was to begin with, for the sake of maintenence we'd still be obligated
to provide at least workarounds for current bugs?


> It does happen, and has happened several times in my lifetime, that an
> entire community is missing an important point. It seems we missed the
> point that change is not what we need... it's addition.

If you're thinking about dropping druntime altogether, that's no mere
addition, that's a MAJOR change.  One that I'd welcome, to be frank, but
it's not going to happen without major breakage of existing codebases.
Are you sure you've thought this through?


T

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