Final by default?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 3/12/14, 5:40 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> 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.

Let's get to the point where we need to worry about that :o).

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

Evolving is different from incessantly changing.

> 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.

This is not my first gig. Due to simple social dynamics, forum 
participation saturates. In their heydays, forums like 
comp.lang.c++.moderated, comp.lang.tex, and comp.lang.perl had traffic 
comparable to ours, although their community was 1-2 orders of magnitude 
larger. Although it seems things are business as usual in our little 
hood here, there is a growing silent majority of D users who aren't on 
the forum.


Andrei