On Sunday, 15 July 2012 at 20:44:01 UTC, Patrick Stewart wrote:
OTOH, it may break the community yet again, which we certainly
don't want, probably even less than breaking code.
Also, the example of Python with two main stable branches that
live in parallel is not very encouraging.
Are you kidding? Python should be used as example of how
software should be engineered. They keep release schedules,
keep stable versions & never break backward compatibility
without giving their users ways to not be stuck in bad
situation. It is well thought and planned. Its popularity and
widespread is not a coincidence, and the fact that it became
de facto part of linuxes (shipping with 5 year old versions
without a fear of deprecation) just proves people can count on
it and use it without fear of some random unguided development
that is typical of D with its half thought our new features
that bite it on the ass year later.
I understand your gripe with breaking changes and bugs, but your
painting of the sate of things is caricatural. First Linuxes are
not shipping with 5 year old versions of Python, they usually
ship with 2.7 which is the last version of the 2 branch.
Meanwhile, the 3 branch is having a hard time getting used,
several years after its introduction, and some major packages
still haven't been ported.
http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3
That is what I was referring to.
I agree the Python roadmap is better paved than the D roadmap,
which hardly exists. It does make a case for a dev and a stable
branch, which makes complete sense. OTOH, Python has suffered
from disruptive changes just as much as D, like the fact that
incorporating UTF in the language has justified a completely new
branch. And talking about half assed features, its reference
implementation suffers from *major* issues, like being slow
(about 5 times slower than the Pypy JIT implementation) and
monothreaded. And that is not going to be fixed any time soon.
And you can't use PyPy for most serious web projects as native
libraries are not compatible and haven't been ported.