The Case Against Autodecode

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, June 02, 2016 09:06:44 Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> Meanwhile, I go to conferences. Train and consult at large companies.
> Dozens every year, cumulatively thousands of people. I talk about D and
> ask people what it would take for them to use the language. Invariably I
> hear a surprisingly small number of reasons:

Are folks going to not start using D because of auto-decoding? No, because
they won't know anything about it. Many of them don't even know anything
about ranges. But it _will_ result in a WTF moment for pretty much everyone.
It happens all the time and results in plenty of questions on D.Learn and
stackoverflow, because no one expects it, and it causes them problems.

Can we sanely remove auto-decoding from Phobos? I don't know. It's
entrenched enough that doing so without breaking code is going to be very
difficult. But at minimum, we need to mitigate it's effects, and I'm sure
that we're going to be sorry in the long run if we don't figure out how to
actually excise it. It's already a major wart that causes frequent problems,
and it's the sort of thing that's going to make a number of folks unhappy
with D in the long run, even if you can convince them to switch to it now
while auto-decoding is still in place. Will it make them unhappy enough to
switch away from D? Probably not. But it is going to be a constant pain
point of the sort that folks frequently complain about with C++ - only this
is one that we'll have, and C++ won't.

- Jonathan M Davis