alt Hacker NewsC# requires explicit assignment. If an appeal to authority sways you (it shouldn't), you can substitute Anders Hejlsberg instead of this random OP. How long do you suppose Anders Hejlsberg thought about this?
But I contend it's more useful (and interesting) to think about the idea with your own mind instead of tallying up the perceived authority of its supporters and relying on trust. It was also somewhat rude to suggest that the OP had not given their idea much thought. This is a forum for discussion, isn't it?
Unfortunately, what happens with explicit assignment is programmers often enough will:
1. just insert '= 0;' to get it to compile
2. insert '= 0;' and then be puzzled by an initialization further along in the code
3. see the '= 0;' and wonder why the programmer did that as 0 was not a valid value for it
A goal of D is to be able to make code more understandable. Forcing a vacuous initialization on the programmer is not conducive to that.