Does D have too many features?

[SomeDude]

On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 20:09:50 UTC, q66 wrote:
> On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 20:05:30 UTC, SomeDude wrote:
>
> There are minimalistic languages that don't add too much 
> complexity, instead it results in code being kept simple.

I appreciate minimalistic languages. I love the simplicity of 
Scheme and the design of Lua. Lua and Python are extensible 
language, but truth be told, they cannot handle large scale 
programming. In fact, I don't know of any minimalistic language 
that can scale from hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of 
code. When you reach these sizes, their simple design becomes a 
drawback. You start missing lots of features. When you reach 
large scale programming, you want really powerful tools.

That's basically what the Java designers discovered after 
experience. The original language was simple and easy, but that 
simplicity translated into way  too much boilerplate code. So 
they kept adding features from version to version, generics, then 
annotations, a means to create new keywords. And now they would 
like to add delegates. These are all needed in large programs.

> D needs to do something it does really well and concentrate on 
> that. Otherwise the language will remain being rather vague and 
> doing "a bit of everything, but nothing truly well".
>

It does a lot of things well already. Our point of comparison 
should not be Python or Lua, it must be C, C++, C#, Haskell, 
Ocaml, i.e languages that are designed to develop large systems.

But most of all it needs to stabilize and polish, not change all 
the time. I think its feature set is very good already.
We are far from having explored all its possibilities.

> Instead of adding more and more features into a rigid language, 
> it needs to be made more flexible and extensible, both 
> syntactically and semantically.