Vision for the D language - stabilizing complexity?

[Andrew Godfrey via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 16 July 2016 at 21:35:41 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 7/16/2016 6:09 AM, Andrew Godfrey wrote:
>> Walter called Prolog "singularly useless". You have been 
>> referring to changes
>> that would amount to a new major version of D as "a cleanup". 
>> From the forums,
>> my sense is that there IS a groundswell of opinion, that D2 
>> has some major
>> mistakes in it that can't be rectified without doing a D3, and 
>> there's a strong
>> reaction to that idea based on experience with D1 -> D2. 
>> Perhaps what is needed
>> is a separate area for discussion about ideas that would 
>> require a major version
>> change. The thing about that is that it can't be done 
>> incrementally; it's the
>> rare kind of thing that would need to be planned long in 
>> advance, and would have
>> to amount to a huge improvement to justify even considering it.
>
> I agree that D2 has made some fundamental mistakes. But it also 
> got a great deal right.
>
> I haven't banned Ola from the forums, he has done nothing to 
> deserve that. He's welcome to post here, and others are welcome 
> to engage him.

I'm more interested in engaging on "in how many years will the D 
leadership be interested in engaging on the topic of D3?" I feel 
this is a significant omission from the vision doc, and that 
omission inflames a lot of the recurring animosity I see on the 
forums. Even an answer of "never" would be a significant 
improvement over "we refuse to engage on that". And I doubt 
you're really thinking "never".

I do think that ideas from academia will mostly cause a lot of 
unwanted noise in such a discussion - because academia, in my 
experience, is more focused on "software construction" than on 
"software evolution", and D takes an approach that is built on 
practical experience with evolution. But academia also has 
occasional nuggets of extreme value.