Is it time for D 3.0?

[Paulo Pinto]

On Friday, 27 March 2020 at 17:22:30 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Fri, 2020-03-27 at 16:55 +0000, Meta via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> 
> […]
>> D has been around for 20 years and hasn't gained the traction 
>> that younger languages like Rust or Go have (though as we all 
>> know, the main reason for this is D's lack of a big corporate 
>> patron a la Mozilla or Google). Maybe what's needed is a "new" 
>> language that breaks backwards compatibility (as 
>> conservatively as possible and hopefully in a way that makes 
>> it easy to automatically port your D2 code).
>
> Whilst D has not had the hype or the instant traction of Rust 
> and Go, it does have some traction and mindshare. This is based 
> on it's history, and it would (in my opinion) be a bad idea to 
> lose this.
>
> I think having a positive strategy towards a D v3 would be a 
> good idea but only if there are big breaking changes to D v2. 
> The current Java evolution strategy is fine, but it's version 
> numbering is an unimitigated disaster – in my view. Groovy has 
> though had the right evolution strategy and the right approach 
> to version numbering – it has fairly recently released v3 for 
> all exactly the right reasons.
>
>> Walter originally wanted to call it the Mars language - maybe 
>> it's time to revive that name in a complete rebranding of the 
>> language.
>
> I think having a brand new language that just happened to have 
> a very simple upgrade path from D v2 would be a self-defeating 
> activity. People would very quickly spot the con.
>
> If D has a future it is in terms of v3, v4, etc. with a strong
> technical evolution (cf. Groovy) and good marketing. Clearly D
> remaining at v2 for ever more would, I feel,  be a Very Bad 
> Idea™ since
> it advertises no changes to the language, i.e. a language with a
> stalled evolution.

Groovy isn't properly a good exemple.

If it wasn't for Gradle and its use in Android, it would be long 
gone and forgotten.

And even there, there is a big pressure to replace it with 
Kotlin, in what regards Android build infrastructure.

So is the fate of any guest language until the main platform 
language catches up.

--
Paulo