dsimcha wrote:
== Quote from Don (nos...@nospam.com)'s article
<small rant>
I completely disagree. I think the two libraries is a disaster. I can
see that so many people have been exposed to a lifetime of propaganda
that "competition is a good thing", but it's just propaganda.
Competition inevitably means wasted effort, and it's obvious in D.
</small rant>
On a purely philosopical note, yes, cooperation is better than competition *if*
there's enough of a consensus among the parties involved as to how things should
be run. However, this is a *BIG* if. The problem with ideologies that are
strongly against competition is that this is very seldom true in the real world.
(Phobos vs. Tango is one example) In these cases, where there is simply no
consensus, the only realistic alternative to competition is to have winners and
losers picked in a dictatorial fashion by some form of authority. Yes, this
authority could be selected democratically by voting, but tyranny of the
majority
is still tyranny. In the case of Phobos vs. Tango, Walter could hypothetically
just try his absolute hardest to kill off Tango, in the name of preventing
competition, but I'm sure noone wants that. Therefore, where no true consensus
exists or ever realistically will exist, competition is often a lesser evil than
having a winner arbitrarily picked by some form of authority.
I'm not convinced that there really is a major idealogical difference
between Phobos and Tango. At the time Tango was formed, Phobos was
virtually stagnant. It was a random accretion of contributions by
various authors from various points in D's history. All changes to
Phobos were manually made by Walter, who had too much on his plate
already. _Nobody_ thought that that situation was ideal.
Tango1 is in direct competition with Phobos1, but Phobos1 is frozen.
Phobos2 is _not_ the same as Phobos1, and breaks compatibility with it
in many serious ways. And Phobos1 and 2 are likely to diverge even more
with time.
There are in fact many similarities between Phobos2 and Tango1.
Now we're getting some genuinely different approaches between Phobos2
and Tango1, but they seem to be driven as much by the new capabilities
in D2, as by philosophical differences. So I see two critical questions:
(1) to what extent will Tango2 embrace D2 features, at the expense of
backward compatibility with Tango1? (The more it embraces D2, the closer
it will become to Phobos2); and
(2) are both libraries prepared to eliminate the many superficial
differences between them?
Can we merge Tango2 and Phobos2, given that neither of them completely
exist yet?
