On 3/12/14, 5:40 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 00:18:06 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 3/12/14, 5:02 PM, Chris Williams wrote:
As someone who would like to be able to use D as a language,
professionally, it's more important to me that D gain future clients
than that it maintains the ones that it has. Even more important is that
it does both of those things.
The saying goes, "you can't make a bucket of yogurt without a spoonful
of rennet". The pattern of resetting customer code into the next
version must end. It's the one thing that both current and future
users want: a pattern of stability and reliability.
Doesn't this sort of seal the language's fate in the long run, though?
Eventually, new programming languages will appear which will learn from
D's mistakes, and no new projects will be written in D.
Let's get to the point where we need to worry about that :o).
Wasn't it here that I heard that a language which doesn't evolve is a
dead language?
Evolving is different from incessantly changing.
From looking at the atmosphere in this newsgroup, at least to me it
appears obvious that there are, in fact, D users who would be glad to
have their D code broken if it means that it will end up being written
in a better programming language.
This is not my first gig. Due to simple social dynamics, forum
participation saturates. In their heydays, forums like
comp.lang.c++.moderated, comp.lang.tex, and comp.lang.perl had traffic
comparable to ours, although their community was 1-2 orders of magnitude
larger. Although it seems things are business as usual in our little
hood here, there is a growing silent majority of D users who aren't on
the forum.
Andrei
