Vision for the D language - stabilizing complexity?

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 17 July 2016 at 02:17:52 UTC, Andrew Godfrey wrote:
> 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.

The question is what is D3 supposed to be? I'm neither for nor 
against D3, it pops up every once in a while when people are not 
happy with a feature. My questions are:

1. Is there any clear vision of what D3 should look like?

2. What exactly will it fix?

3. Is there a prototype (in progress) to actually prove it will 
fix those things?

4. If there is (real) proof[1], would it justify a break with D2 
and risk D's death?

I think this topic is too serious to be just throwing in (partly 
academic) ideas that might or might not work in the real world. 
It's too serious to use D as a playground and later say "Ah well, 
it didn't work. [shrug]". D has left the playground and can no 
longer afford to just play around with ideas randomly. One has to 
be realistic.

I'd also like to add that if we had a "clean and compact" D3, it 
would become more complex over time and people would want D4 to 
solve this, then D5 and so forth. I haven't seen any software yet 
that hasn't become more complex over time.

Last but not least, it would help to make a list of the things D2 
got right to put the whole D3 issue into proportion.

[1] I.e. let's not refer to other languages in an eclectic 
manner. I'm asking for a proof that D works as D3 and is superior 
to D2.