On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 08:40:32 UTC, Andre Pany wrote:
On Saturday, 25 August 2018 at 20:52:06 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
In the whole discussion I miss 2 really important things.
If your product compiles fine with a dmd version, no one forces
you to update to the next dmd version. In the company I work
for, we set for each project the DMD version in the build
settings. The speed of DMD releases or breaking changes doesn't
affect us at all.
No. Nobody forces you to use the latest version that may have an
improved GC, new library functions or bug fixes. In fact, why
bother with improving the language at all? But how do you feel
about code that you've been compiling with, say dmd 2.071.2 for
years now - including workarounds for compiler bugs? Doesn't the
thought of having to upgrade it one day bother you at all? What
if your customer said that 2.08++ had better features asking you
to use them?
The burden of finding paths to handle deprecations etc. is on the
user, not the language developers. And this is where the
psychological factor that Laeeth was talking about comes in. If
you're constantly programming thinking "Whatever I write today
might break tomorrow, uh, and what about the code I wrote in
2016? Well, I'll have to upgrade it one day, when I have time.
I'll just keep on using an older version of dmd for now. Yeah,
no, I cannot benefit from the latest improvements but at least it
compiles with dmd2.st0neage. But why worry, I'll just have to get
used to the fact that I have different code for different
versions, for now...and forever."
You can get used to anything until you find out that it doesn't
need to be this way. You write unexciting Java code and hey, it
works and it always will. It took me a while to understand why
Java has been so successful, but now I know. It's not write once,
run everywhere. It's write once, run forever. Stability,
predictability. And maybe that's why Java, Go and once C++ prefer
a slower pace.
I just don't understand why it is so hard to understand the
points I and others have made. It's not rocket science, but maybe
this is the problem, because I already see, the point to take
home is: There are no real problems, we are just imagining them.
Real world experience doesn't count, because we just don't see
the bigger picture which is the eternal glory of academic
discussions about half baked features of an eternally unfinished
language that keeps changing randomly. Not practical, but
intellectually satisfying.
