On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 00:40:34 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev
wrote:
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.
Wasn't it here that I heard that a language which doesn't
evolve is a dead language?
IMO, one of the reasons D exists is all the historical baggage
C/C++ chose to carry instead of evolving.
I can cite a business case I had the displeasure of working on as
well. They chose not to evolve, and instead ended up spending
$11 million years later to rewrite their infrastructure while
maintaining the antiquated one so they could still function. And
the latter was never realized. They're probably due for another
large, time consuming, disruptive, expensive project in the near
future.
Point is, it's in the best interest of both languages and
businesses building on those languages to evolve, or they just
end up paying the piper later (with interest).
Gradual, managed change is where it's at, IMNSHO.
