On Friday, 19 December 2014 at 14:03:06 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
On Friday, 19 December 2014 at 11:39:08 UTC, Joakim wrote:
On Friday, 19 December 2014 at 10:04:34 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
On 12/18/2014 1:39 PM, Vic wrote:
But this is not the culture of the creators. They think
adding features is fun.
I spent most of my time saying "no" to new features and
trying to find ways to support things without adding features.
I think his point is that you haven't said "no" enough. ;) A
tough job, but then BDFL doesn't come without its pains.
I don't think the problem is saying no here.
The problem is that many feature are incomplete or have holes
or are not orthogonal to each others. Let me take 2 simple
examples :
- type qualifiers are transitive. Except for delegate's
context.
- There is no implicit sharing. Except via delegate (because
of the above mentioned point), exceptions and promotion of pure
function's result.
The problem with having these holes, is that you can't rely on
anything. That makes it very hard to write reliable library, or
to add new features as you get a myriad of special cases all
over the place.
Sometime, fixing these holes require adding new feature, or
extending a bit existing ones. That is fine as this new thing
will allow for closure of what is already open. This is a
beneficial addition and saying no would be a step back.
In other situations, adding new feature simply extends the
language and create new specials cases. In which case, no or
later is the appropriate answer at this point.
While implementation quality of all these features is no doubt a
big part of the problem, my guess, based on Vic's previous post
about stripping down the language to a stable core, is that he'd
prefer if some subset of D's features were put off or ditched
altogether. Of course, that ties into the fact that the more
features you have, the less time you have to polish them and make
sure each feature interacts well with everything else,
particularly given D's small core team.
As for Walter already saying "no" a lot, given how many features
D has, obviously one can still wish he went from 99% "no" to
99.5%. ;) You don't need to be around the D community forever to
feel that D still has too many features that made it in.
