On 02-05-2012 03:08, ixid wrote:
The idea of D3 is a worrying one- it suggests a number of things that would not be good for the success and adoption of the language. That the language is experimental and more of a pet project, that D2 has a shelf-life and will be abandoned. I can see D going in two directions: it can gradually grow and progressively gain areas where it's the standard choice or it will be a fairly small community of fans of an eternal language project. Python 2 and 3 has been a very messy split, while languages with a greater sense of continuity do better for it in my view, having one standard version of that language. Breaking changes may be desirable but I don't think labelling that as v2/v3 is a good idea, make it one thing with one suggested version.
I agree wholeheartedly. This whole "D3" excuse for not fixing design issues in the language is going to hurt us in the long run.
What are the aims of D3 that aren't aims of D2? What could be done then that can't be done now? Wouldn't it be better to make breaking changes sooner rather than later?
Yes and no. In theory, it's good to stabilize the language now and make a new version of it later which has breaking changes. In practice, that's annoying as hell. We've already seen how slow the transition from D1 to D2 is (not was; it's still happening!). D2 to D3 is going to be even slower (see in particular your Python 2 vs 3 example) simply because more and more people are going to be using D2 and therefore can't afford to port their applications to D3.
-- - Alex
