Hello Don,
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?
I agree that these are the critical questions, and we will need to see them
answered eventually. The question is "when?" I suppose, the Tango people
probably can't answer that until they see a stable D 2.0 and a complete Phobos
2. On the other hand, perhaps its a very good time for Tango guys to be
introduced to the Phobos 2 floor plan so that both sides can see if their
goals can merge somehow.
-JJR
