Final by default?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 3/12/14, 9:40 PM, Manu wrote:
> On 13 March 2014 12:48, Andrei Alexandrescu
> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org <mailto:SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org>>
> wrote:
>
>     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.
>
>
> Again, trivialising the importance of this change.
>
>          >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.
>
>
> Are you suggesting that only we in this thread care about this, at the
> expense of that growing silent majority?
>
> Many of the new user's I've noticed appearing are from my industry.
> There are seemingly many new gamedevs or ambitious embedded/mobile
> users. The recent flurry of activity on the cross-compilers, Obj-C, is a
> clear demonstration of that interest.
> I suspect they are a significant slice of the growing majority, and
> certainly of the growing potential. They care about this, whether they
> know it or not. Most users aren't low-level experts, even though it
> matters to their projects.
>
> I want to know what you think the potential or likely future breakdown
> of industrial application of D looks like?
>
> I have a suspicion that when the cross compilers are robust and word
> gets out, you will see a surge of game/realtime/mobile devs, and I don't
> think it's unrealistic, or even unlikely, to imagine that this may be
> D's largest developer audience at some time in the (not too distant?)
> future.
> It's the largest native-code industry left by far, requirements are not
> changing, and there are no other realistic alternatives I'm aware of on
> the horizon. Every other facet of software development I can think of
> has competition in the language space.

I hear you. Time to put this in a nice but firm manner: your arguments 
were understood but did not convince. The matter has been settled. There 
will be no final by default in the D programming language. Hope you 
understand.


Thanks,

Andrei