standardization of D

[janderson]

janderson wrote:
> David B. Held wrote:
>> 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
> 
> I couldn't have put it better!

Academic wise 1.0 is a good thing because you want people to be able to 
compile and run your algorithms.  For instance, my pre 1v thesis source 
code will no-longer compile because a couple of the D libraries I was 
using broke.  Luckily I have a version of the compiler that did work 
however foolishly I forgot to mention which version.

-Joel