D Editions

[Federico]

On Thursday, 30 May 2024 at 18:31:48 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
> https://github.com/atilaneves/DIPs/blob/editions/editions.md
>
> Destroy!


I hope you will tolerate this unsolicited intrusion of mine, but 
as an outsider to your world, I feel the need to say something.

Not long ago, I approached this language because, after examining 
its fundamentals, I judged it to be the perfect evolution of "my" 
C language. A few days later, I changed my mind, not because I 
was wrong in judging the D language, but because D is unusable. 
And it is unusable because you do everything to make it so.

Let me explain: the primary requirement for a programming 
language is not its flexibility, power, ease of learning, etc. 
No, the primary requirement is its stability and the certainty 
that code written for a release will be compiled by all compilers 
and libraries that support it.

And this is what makes D unusable (and indeed practically 
unused). As soon as it is born, a fork of its system library... 
as soon as it starts to receive support from major IDEs, a fork 
of the language. Now I see your willingness to make it 
"dynamically scalable"... my friends, this way, you're going 
nowhere.

Let's talk about the initiative related to this thread: it 
doesn't work. It's not acceptable that using the same language, I 
would write code that wouldn't be compiled by the machine of the 
programmer at the desk next to mine. This would be possible if I 
were programming in C and he in D, but if we both work in Dv2, 
the language standard must be the same for everyone.

Of course, there can be a Dv3, Dv4... Dv2001, but someone has to 
standardize each version and, once done, there must be a freeze 
that prevents changes (except for debugging).

Maybe I am too conservative for a lively language like this, it 
happens to us sixty-year-olds. But being sixty has an advantage: 
we know the business world well. From experience, I would find it 
very difficult to convince a company to use code written in D. 
Companies are more conservative than sixty-year-olds and do not 
like investments that change from one day to the next. Asking a 
programmer what version of D they work with is inconvenient, it 
is much more practical not to accept D.

Now I retreat, apologizing for the inconvenience caused.

Regards, U.