DIP23 draft: Fixing properties redux

[Zach the Mystic]

On Wednesday, 6 February 2013 at 02:36:13 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> 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

Well, Jonathan M Davis, I had posted a second response to 
Andrei's first comment before reading either his second one or 
yours. But I think I pretty much explained my position, for 
better or worse. It's not so much not having the feature included 
so much as wanting to know why because despite Andrei's clear 
intelligence and good intentions, I felt pretty strongly that I 
had put onto the table something very good.