Feedback on Átila's Vision for D

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Wednesday, 16 October 2019 at 12:23:47 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
wrote:
> - "D also needs a clean up" < implying it's too dirty to save, 
> which is just funny as ProtoObject and copy-ctor makes is 
> cleaner, the clean-up is actually in progress,

Well, for a new comer that is experienced in other languages 
seemingly arbitrary rough edges sends a very negative signal. 
Especially if it looks as unplanned as the low level 
"introspection" API. People tend to pick up languages in their 
spare time and they want to write beautiful code. You generally 
don't want people that read documentation to think "How on earth 
did they land on this api?" or "Wow, this looks really complex. I 
don't have time for this."

Anyway, Go has some aspects of this too, despite its 
"minimalism". Python is also going downhill, it has in version 
3.8 started to introduce careless design flaws.

Is it possible to clean up a language, well, yes if people who 
implement it doesn't have veto power. If people have spent months 
on implementing something then they have big issues when someone 
wants to erase it. Understandably.

Which is why languages very seldom become prettier, they tend to 
become heavier and heavier and suffer more and more from 
featuritis. There are frankly few examples of the opposite.

Dart 2.0 might be one counter example perhaps, although that 
assumes that you find dynamic languages with no static typing 
unpleasant. So it might be possible... but you know. Not typical.