On Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:47:55 -0400, Steve Teale
<steve.te...@britseyeview.com> wrote:
What D needs at this point is a dictator. There are about 30 pages of
discussion about Walter's std.array.front post, and Steve S's counter
post.
It reminds me of the way it was maybe 4 years ago, when there was so
much bickering that I just gave up for some time, and went away. Who is
going to go through all that stuff, and winnow a compromise out of it.
Everyone has a job, or some vital preoccupation with their own project.
The buck has to stop somewhere - is it Walter, or Andrei, or can any
proposal or comment be stalled by sheer weight of contrary views?
This is probably a management issue, not a technical one. Trouble is
there's no manager, and even if their was, he'd have no minions.
What to do?
But it already is this way. What we have now are the gatekeepers of Walter
and Andrei, and they (rightfully) hold a very high bar as to what should
go into the language. They are the dictators, that we get to question and
debate with. I don't consider it bickering at all.
Debate, and especially heated debate, has always been a part of the
forums. What else would you expect? Any time you have an open platform for
discussion, things like this will show up. You can probably just ignore
it, unless you care. In fact my newsreader has a feature to ignore entire
threads. I ignore many of them, simply because I don't have the time in
the day to debate everything. But things I care about, I want to make sure
my point of view is being expressed, even if it's not me expressing it (in
this case, nobody seemed to be presenting that view).
This is not a democracy, and it's a good thing that it's not. But it
absolutely must remain an open platform for people to voice opinions.
Consider how long Walter resisted the call to make functions final by
default, until he suddenly switched sides. I think of it like a
dictatorship with 1000 advisors. And no death squads :)
BTW, I don't expect a compromise, or really any movement, on the string
issue. At least until someone has the wherewithal and motivation to
actually try some things out with experimentation, and identify what the
result might be. Until then, everything is theory. I was actually quite
surprised Walter even considered fixing the problem to begin with.
-Steve
