Worse is better?

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 10 October 2014 at 22:27:04 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> I agree that 'alias this' syntax is a bit hackish, and I've 
> never been happy with that, but the semantics are pretty darned 
> good.

I think that such features often are the result of special casing 
that could have been handled by more generic solutions. Then they 
become superfluous later when more generic constructs are added 
and you end up with many ways of doing the same thing (complexity 
with no gain).

In this case some kind of inheritance, some variation of static 
interface, or some kind of deductive system/rewrite system 
probably would have been more powerful and covered the same use 
case.