Go ahead and break code, but give us the tools to fix it. (Was Re: Dicebot on leaving D: It is anarchy driven development in all its glory.)

[John Carter]

On Monday, 27 August 2018 at 04:00:18 UTC, John Carter wrote:

> Rather the assumption must be, a language processor eats 
> source, it can (re)write source as well.

And before any one mentions halting problems and the 
impossibility of a compiler understanding whether a refactoring 
is behaviour altering.....

My empirical experience with this is, most recent advances in 
language design have been around making it harder to make stupid 
mistakes.

And whenever I have found a chunk of pre-existing code that 
required substantial modification to update it to the new 
language paradigm... it was because it was buggy already, and 
attempting to express the current behaviour in latest preferred 
idiomatic way made that obvious.

ie. It was hard to move that code to latest preferred idiom 
because it require a bug fix AND a syntactic tweak.

ie. That code was working "by accident" or not at all.

The older I get the less sympathy and mercy I have for code that 
works "by accident" and the more I encourage language designers 
to evolve our tools faster to give us more safety from our own 
inexhaustible supply of stupidity.