DIP23 draft: Fixing properties redux

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, February 05, 2013 21:22:34 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Note that most people tend to vastly overestimate their few first
> language designs, and that there are much more people who think are good
> at language design than those actually are. (Note I'm only passing
> opinion on what I saw; You may as well be an awesome language designer,
> but the spark is not visible in this particular proposal.) Though I've
> had an idea or two that stuck, I confess without any false modesty that
> I don't consider myself to be a noted language designer.

Another thing to consider is that it's fairly common for people to come up 
with ideas that seem like very good ideas and seem very solid but which 
ultimately end up falling apart due to corner cases. And we're already 
suffering from features which are partially implemented and not necessarily 
fully thought through, even if they're solid in their basics.

As far as changing D goes, we're far enough along in the process that anything 
which would break backwards compatibility needs a really compelling case for 
it happen. We're trying to stabilize the language, which _does_ require 
breaking code in some cases, but we'd like to minimize that. Backwards 
compatible feature requests are more likely to make it in, but even then, they 
need very compelling use cases and are likely to be held back by all of the 
work that _needs_ to be done (new features may be nice, but they're unlikely 
to be necessary at this point). We're past the point where we're freely 
mucking with the language to try out new ideas but instead are trying to 
polish what we have.

But as Andrei says, there's tons of room for stuff to be done on the library 
front and plenty of work to do helping out with stuff like documentation and 
articles. So, there's tons for people to do to help out, and there's certainly 
plenty of innovation that could be done with regards to how stuff is handled in 
new stuff in the standard library. It's just the lanugage itself where we're 
limiting what innovation we put into it at this point.

- Jonathan M Davis