Final by default?

[Nick Sabalausky]

On 3/12/2014 8:40 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 00:18:06 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>
>> 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?

Keep in mind this isn't an all-or-nothing matter of "From now on, D will 
never evolve and never correct past mistakes". It's just a matter of 
"What's the right thing for D at this point in time?" Right now, the 
answer is "mature and stabilize".

*After* we've gotten there, that's when we'll face a choice of "Ok, so 
what now?" Maybe the answer will be "Yes, at this point we have the 
resources, userbase, stability, etc such that we can manage doing a 
branch to break out of the x, y and z corners we've painted ourselves 
into." Or maybe it'll be "Problems x, y and z have either become 
mitigated because of a, b and c, or we now have previously-unseen ways 
to deal with them non-destructively."

Right now: mature and stabilize. *Then* worry about where to go from 
there, breaking vs stagnating.

> Eventually, new programming languages will appear which will learn from
> D's mistakes, and no new projects will be written in D.
>

Sure. That's inevitable anyway. The trick is for D to prosper enough for 
D-next to be that new language, instead of something unrelated.