Remember the Vasa! by Bjarne Stroustrup

[Chameleon]

On Tuesday, 29 May 2018 at 23:55:07 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
> Which is ironic considering...
>
> Ken Thomson : " Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and 
> years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made 
> to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran 
> all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he 
> said “no” to no one. He put every feature in that language that 
> ever existed. It wasn’t cleanly designed—it was just the union 
> of everything that came along. And I think it suffered 
> drastically from that."
>
> Donald Knuth : "Whenever the C++ language designers had two 
> competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they 
> said "OK, we'll do them both". So the language is too baroque 
> for my taste."

good old Ken and Don are from a generation where you could 
(typically) understand the whole langauge.

those times have passed. no really.. they have...I'm not 
kidding...

It is now just complete nonsense that one person should be able 
to understand a modern programming langauge. At best, they will 
understand some of it.

These days, it must be about collaboration - which is something D 
suffers from not having, due to people believing that they should 
be able to understand it all, and therefore progress should stop 
when this no longer becomes possible.

That is essentially a human-ego driven perspective, that holds 
back progress.

Progress in modern times requires collaboration. People who know 
and understand parts, connecting and collaborating with people 
who know and understand other parts.

That is the way the C++ design by committee works. It might not 
be perfect, but its much better than having a King that you 
cannot say 'no' too (ie Vasa), or a King that always says 'no' to 
the people.

D needs more collaborators, and less kings.