Vision for the D language - stabilizing complexity?

[jmh530 via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 18 July 2016 at 13:48:16 UTC, Andrew Godfrey wrote:
>
> 1) As you say, a vision for D3. Maybe just a summary of the 
> things that are now agreed upon, e.g. autodecoding (though even 
> there, I think the details of where to move to, are still 
> contentious. E.g. I personally dislike the convention of "char" 
> meaning a 1-byte data type but I think some others like it).
>
> 2) The case against incremental breaking changes. (I see this 
> argument somewhat, though it applies less to "dfixable" 
> breaking changes).
>
> 3) Why we feel that breaking changes risk killing D outright. 
> (I just don't see it. I wonder if we're confusing "dfixable" 
> breaking changes, with other more disruptive kinds (such as 
> Tango=>Phobos).)

I wasn't around for the D1 to D2 change, but I was around for 
Python 2 to Python 3, which was inconvenient.

My sense is that a lot of the things mentioned here are 
"woulda-coulda-shoulda", like having defaults be @safe instead of 
@system. Would have been nice to have from the beginning, but 
just seems way too disruptive to change it now.

However, I don't have any particular issue with incremental 
breaking changes that are dfixable. But I think that saving them 
all up to do a huge D3 is potentially more disruptive than doing 
a small D3, completely dfixable, then a small D4, etc. Even a D3 
that just changed autodecoding (which I don't think is dixable, 
but who knows) would be good as it would be just a small limited 
breaking change.