[OT] Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You

[Walter Bright]

On 8/18/2020 3:17 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> I've suggested this coyly for years - coyly because it seemed so unclean and 
> compromise-y: we should deprecate "psychologically", by keeping things but using 
> (natural) language and UX techniques to deemphasize the deprecated libraries and 
> (programming) language features. Use gray text, smaller, italicized, slightly 
> more difficult to read. Put it one extra click away. Start those sections with a 
> RED YELLING warning. Emphasize disadvantages and point to better approaches. 
> Over time, even remove documentation for deprecated features but leave them in. 
> And so on. Emacs and Java have shown that this works.

I agree. We've done too much feature removal. Your suggestions are good. On a 
pragmatic note, we have UNDEFINED_BEHAVIOR and IMPLEMENTATION_DEFINED macros for 
the documentation - we could add DEPRECATED and then style it as seems appropriate.

I created the undeaD library because it was simply too much work to transfer the 
old D1 date/time code to the new stuff. There was no straightforward way to do 
it. I needed it for my own code. We should have left it in, just de-emphasized 
it as you suggest.