Does D have too many features?

[SomeDude]

On Sunday, 29 April 2012 at 06:11:00 UTC, Era Scarecrow wrote:
>>> My list:
>>> * I'd start with getting rid of foreach completely. (not just 
>>> foreach_reverse).
>
>> C++ was criticized for a long time for NOT having foreach in 
>> the language. Now they have 
>> http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/C++0xFAQ.html#for. Also 
>> people were so desperate to gave it that even this 
>> http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_49_0/doc/html/foreach.html was 
>> considered a nice addition to boost (and still part of it).
>>
>> Obviously somehow you want to go into the opposite direction. 
>> Beats me.
>
>  If it simplifies code, makes it easier, and is more 
> consistent, having it is better than not having it. Like walter 
> said in one of the recent videos (going native 2012) regarding 
> having an assembler in a language: 'When you need it, you got 
> to have it'. True most features can be re-written as work 
> arounds, but if you don't have to then why insist on it?
>
>  Backtracking by removing key features which make the language 
> pleasant may throw us back into the C and C++ days. Yes you can 
> do full memory management yourself, and use pointers and pass 
> it's size to functions. We have fat pointers, so why insist on 
> backtracking? At the worst case if it isn't breaking the 
> language leave it alone. If you have good reasons for it, 
> explain them in detail. At best those of us who know better 
> will laugh and move on.

One of the ideas that I see regularly thrown around is to remove 
more and more things from the core language and put them in the 
libraries, because it's possible, and it would make for a thinner 
languages.
Well, these are good reasons to do it, but there are many good 
reasons NOT to do it.

Some general reasons:
1. code is uglier when in the libraries. One must add imports, 
and template code is uglier and harder to write than plain old 
code.
2. template code makes bigger size executables
3. error messages are more cryptic
4. we like to think that putting things in the library helps 
changing things easier, but my opinion is, changing fundamental 
structures in the standard library may actually break more code 
than changing them in the core language, because of the heavy 
interplay between modules, and also because the standard library 
is probably less well tested (in terms of number of regression 
tests) than the core language.
5. it makes work much harder for tools and parsers

Specific to D:
6. my impression is, from what I've seen in Bugzilla, that Phobos 
bugs tend to stay around longer, because there is not enough 
workforce on it


These a lot of drawbacks in my opinion. Basically, one of the 
main reasons the D code is clean, is because the core languages 
features so many useful things, with a nice, clean syntax. Moving 
them to the standard library will automatically make the code 
uglier and the language harder to use.