Fatal flaw in D design which is holding back widespread adoption

[Don]

Matt wrote:
> Hello all.  I've been so fascinated with D ever since I first read about it a few years ago.  I read the design descriptions and language features just for fun sometimes at work when I'm bored.
> 
> It makes me so sad, though, that the language will never take off because of one fatal flaw that plagues the widespread adoption of the language.  It's a flaw that makes educated people move on because they simply won't take the language seriously.  I daresay there have been millions who were about to learn D and then found out this flaw, unfortunately figured it was a beginner's language, and moved on to another exciting new language.
> 
> The fatal flaw is that tabs are 8 characters in D's official style guide, including Phobos and other official D source code.  

It's being phased out of Phobos, in D2 it only exists now in the really 
old stuff which is scheduled for deprecation. That particular convention 
has only ever been followed by Walter. So the DMD source code (which is 
written in C++, not D) will probably always use that idiosyncracy, but I 
don't think anything else will.

I think that the style guide should be removed. It's rather obsolete and 
was never completely accepted. It's misleading, and not adding much 
value any more.