Is it time for D1 to die of natural causes?

[Lutger]

Justin Johansson wrote:

> Don wrote:
>> Justin Johansson wrote:
>>> Now that Andrei's much anticipated publication of TDPL is out, is it
>>> time that D1 should now perish?
>>>
>>> My personal feeling is that by cremating D1, time and effort can then
>>> be better expended and focused on solidifying D2.
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>> Justin Johansson
>> 
>> I estimate that D1 has at least a year before it becomes "the legacy
>> version". In any case, there's not much effort going specificially into
>> D1 at the expense of D2.
> 
>> But it's probably time to change statements about D2 being an unstable
>> beta version, and we should start to encourage newcomers to use D2
>> rather than D1.
> Agree that would be a positive step
> 
>> In particular, we should make sure that tutorials and documentation
>> should be updated to D2, or else clearly marked as applying only to D1.
> Well should the current version be called just D rather than D2 and
> simply pretend that D1 does not exist?

Not too be lame, but what do you think is the benefit of that? Do you think D1 
harms D2?

At digitalmars.com/d, D2 is currently being called 'the next generation under 
development' and D1 is designated as 'stable' Personally I would say D must 
always mean the current stable release of the language, which should soon have 
version number 2 hopefully :) 

Last week I was on a RoR course, typing something into irb version 
1.9.something. The teacher demonstrated it did not work, but he was on 
1.8.something. He also remarked that Ruby backwards compatibility can break even 
between minor versions, it is a source of annoyance but clearly not of dread. So 
there is some precedent here.

Related to this topic: it would be nice to know how the language will move 
forward from this point, specifically wrt backwards compatibility. From reading 
the TDPL I get the feeling the language is somewhat more stable and focus has  
shifted, but not set in stone at all.