On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu<seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote: > Bill Baxter wrote: >> >> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Andrei >> Alexandrescu<seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote: >>> >> I think the expectation is more that you would address or respond to >> his argument rather than making your own argument again. >> >> Or say something like this: >> The fundamental difference in our viewpoints is that you believe that >> expressing extra semantic information to people who read the code is >> more valuable that saving some typing. I believe the opposite. >> >> (feel free to rewrite as you wish) Then it is clear that you have >> understood his argument and have some idea how and where the >> difference in opinion really comes from. Simply repeating your >> argument makes it look as though you have not read his. > > Well we both repeated our arguments several times :o). And don't forget: I > don't get to decide. So such a discussion between Steve and me could as well > be a discussion between any two participants.
That's not quite true. You do talk to Walter more than Steve does. And I think everyone can guess that if you don't get convinced there's no way Walter will be. Convincing you isn't sufficient, but it is necessary. > I do have accountability for Phobos, and there haven't been huge debates > about it that I vetoed against, have there? You have indeed made a good effort there. It was iffy for a while with the head/toe thing, but you did come around. :-) >> I don't think it's this one issue he's talking about. I think the >> issue is an occasionally repeated history of questionable changes in D >> made in the face of strong community opposition. Like >> foreach_reverse. Such choices may be perfectly valid, but if you find >> yourself repeatedly not seeing eye-to-eye with the designers of a >> language, you have to wonder if you're in the right language >> community. > > I understand. On the other hand, a lot of good things have been done in > relative silence, which are likely to positively impact code writing > experience a great deal. They just need some more riping. For example, I > consider the recently-introduced value range propagation an excellent > feature and a well-balanced engineering tradeoff. Such a thing *would* be > the kind of feature that would make me cast an interested eye over a > language. Finally, a step forward in the always-muddy world of fixed-size > integer arithmetic. Then probably I'd try value range propagation and see > the compiler essentially fail for all cases (Walter, Walter... I wonder if > you had *any* test case for the thing) and then give up in frustration. There's probably a connection there with human nature's way of remembering affronts much more clearly and dearly than compliments. --bb