> Should the committee do some breaking changes to make HN commenters happier, who don’t even use the language?
As phrased, you clearly want the answer to this question to be no, but the irony there is that that is how you kill a language. This is simply survivor bias, like inspecting the bullet damage only on the fighter planes that survive. You should also be listening to people who don't want to use your language to understand why they don't want that, especially people that stopped using the language. Otherwise you risk becoming more and more irrelevant. It won't all be valuable evidence, but they are clearly the people that cannot live with the problems. When other languages listen, better alternatives arise.
> you clearly want the answer to this question to be no
Uh yes. It’s phrased that way because it’s absurd. About half the comments in this section are a form of name calling by people who don’t understand constructors/destructors.
Those people who have no insight into how to make initialization better.
> Otherwise you risk becoming more and more irrelevant
Relevancy is relative to an audience. You want to listen to people who care and have your interests in mind.
C++ and Java are the most relevant languages in terms of professional software engineering.
You missed the forest for the trees. Since my claim is that
> people who care and have your interests in mind
that have valuable insights about the problems of the language and so understand constructors and destructors but don't make you susceptible to survivor bias are
>> especially people that stopped using the language.
People that don't want to learn the language in the first place offer a different kind of insight, insight into a world where constructors and destructors aren't needed.
As phrased, you clearly want the answer to this question to be no, but the irony there is that that is how you kill a language. This is simply survivor bias, like inspecting the bullet damage only on the fighter planes that survive. You should also be listening to people who don't want to use your language to understand why they don't want that, especially people that stopped using the language. Otherwise you risk becoming more and more irrelevant. It won't all be valuable evidence, but they are clearly the people that cannot live with the problems. When other languages listen, better alternatives arise.