Does D have too many features?

[D Day]

On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 20:49:33 UTC, Maxim Fomin wrote:
> On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 18:48:18 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Andrei and I had a fun discussion last night about this 
>> question. The idea was which features in D are redundant 
>> and/or do not add significant value?
>>
>> A couple already agreed upon ones are typedef and the cfloat, 
>> cdouble and creal types.
>>
>> What's your list?
>
> I guess the underlying problem is inability to formulate the 
> target state of the language with specified relations between 
> different components. Being looking at the language since late 
> 2011 I found problematic to know the language as a whole. When 
> a newcomer looks for information he either gets a common 
> overview "native efficiency, ..." at dlang.org with (outdated) 
> documentation or videos on youtube which explains how 
> scope(xxx) beats exceptions and templates are superior to that 
> in C++ and similar posts in the web, let alone toolchain lack 
> complaints.
>
> My comment was provoked mainly by 
> http://forum.dlang.org/thread/vwpzirpppabcgylmvpsx@forum.dlang.org 
> discussion (D3 idea).
>
> You ask which features are redundant or not significant, but 
> this depends on how features are integrated in the rest of 
> language and without clear and completed vision there is no 
> answer. And please remember, that each of D member has its own 
> (biased) information about D and what to do. The language is 
> moving and it is hard to reveal how any change will affect 
> other components. Even if you found a particular item redundant 
> there is no guarantee that the situation will not change in 
> future.
>
> Currently I (who looked for a language that combines C# 
> "usability" and C performance) view D as a ship which sails in 
> unknown direction with lots of holes (look at bugzilla 
> proposals how to make a language) and what I found the most 
> dreaded is that the direction of the ship movement today is 
> determined by which hole was fixed yesterday.
>
> So, you are free to ask ship's crew about what hole and how to 
> fix and expect that it will tomorrow bring ship to a better 
> place, but without final destination this brownian movement may 
> theoretically last infinitely, but of course, in practice it 
> will lead either to ship crashing, departure of sailors or 
> finally targeting an unexpected place with unsatisfactory 
> result.