On Sun, 15 Jul 2012 14:20:14 -0700, SomeDude <lovelyd...@mailmetrash.com>
wrote:
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.
To be fair, the majority of the problems you listed with Python have
nothing to do with their release process but their design process. The two
are unrelated. The fact that it suffers disruptive changes is an argument
for dev/stable branches, not against.
--
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/