On Thursday, 12 May 2016 at 20:15:45 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Here are some that are not matters of opinion.
If you're serious about removing auto-decoding, which I think you and others have shown has merits, you have to the THE SIMPLEST migration path ever, or you will kill D. I'm talking a simple press of a button.
I'm not exaggerating here. Python, a language which was much more popular than D at the time, came out with two versions in 2008: Python 2.7 which had numerous unicode problems, and Python 3.0 which fixed those problems. Almost eight years later, and Python 2 is STILL the more popular version despite Py3 having five major point releases since and Python 2 only getting security patches. Think the tango vs phobos problem, only a little worse.
D is much less popular now than was Python at the time, and Python 2 problems were more straight forward than the auto-decoding problem. You'll need a very clear migration path, years long deprecations, and automatic tools in order to make the transition work, or else D's usage will be permanently damaged.
