Final by default?

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 00:18:06 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 3/12/14, 5:02 PM, Chris Williams wrote:
>> As someone who would like to be able to use D as a language,
>> professionally, it's more important to me that D gain future 
>> clients
>> than that it maintains the ones that it has. Even more 
>> important is that
>> it does both of those things.
>
> The saying goes, "you can't make a bucket of yogurt without a 
> spoonful of rennet". The pattern of resetting customer code 
> into the next version must end. It's the one thing that both 
> current and future users want: a pattern of stability and 
> reliability.

Doesn't this sort of seal the language's fate in the long run, 
though? Eventually, new programming languages will appear which 
will learn from D's mistakes, and no new projects will be written 
in D.

Wasn't it here that I heard that a language which doesn't evolve 
is a dead language?

 From looking at the atmosphere in this newsgroup, at least to me 
it appears obvious that there are, in fact, D users who would be 
glad to have their D code broken if it means that it will end up 
being written in a better programming language. (I'm one of them, 
for the record; I regularly break my own code anyway when 
refactoring my library.) Although I'm not advocating forking off 
a D3 here and now, the list of things we wish we could fix is 
only going to grow.