standardization of D

[David B. Held]

Ameer Armaly wrote:
> Hi all. There are a few things which have been bothering me as of late, and 
> I want your opinions on them to know whether or not I'm jumping at shadows. 
> For starters, we all have a common goal of making D as widely used as 
> possible since we all love the language, otherwise we probably wouldn't be 
> here. At the same time, there are a few factors which as I see it make the 
> adoption of D much more difficult and need to be addressed if we intend to 
> succeed:
> [...]

I think one thing to keep in mind is that the 1.0 release was basically 
a gift to the user community to lend D that air of authenticity that 
business folks need to let their people use a new toy.  In reality, 
there are so many radical features being considered for D that it's 
really comparable to C++ in its CFront stage rather than the ARM, let 
alone, ANSI stage.  On the one hand, D needs users to push the language 
to expose its weaknesses.  On the other hand, D needs the flexibility to 
break some stuff to add compelling new features.  It's a tricky business 
bootstrapping a new language, and only people who can tolerate life on 
the bleeding edge survive in this kind of space.

D does indeed need a fair bit of time before it becomes sufficiently 
stable to consider something like standardization.  Even choosing a 
standard library would be premature, given that D has nothing like the 
STL yet, though something is planned.  And having a wealth of choices 
isn't a bad thing.  If functionality grossly overlapped, that would be 
one thing.  But by providing libraries with different design 
philosophies to appeal to different user segments, D can ease the 
transition for more programmers.  If anything, now is the time to think 
hard about what you think a language should have, and make a strong case 
for your favorite features.  There's no guarantee your feature will get 
implemented, but look how hard it is to get something added to a 
language as big and mature as C++...

Dave