On Monday, 8 September 2014 at 23:48:54 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
On Monday, 8 September 2014 at 23:39:17 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
Because original post had no learning context at all. I would
gladly support initiative to provide more example-based
tutorials for DMD contribution. Or any call for feedback based
on existing patches. But it has nothing like that, instead
focusing on "here is what I like to change in D so I keep
local patches it" side of things. And this is really bad.
There may not yet be a learning context for the overall
community, but there is for the small group of people who want to
experiment with the different syntax that they've come up with.
They may find that their syntax changes don't work as well as
they thought and abandon them. A bunch of them may find one
particular syntax change or addition to be very useful and push
for it to be included in the mainline frontend. We won't know
any of this till they experiment and talk to each other.
Nothing is perfect and freedoms of open source come with their
own drawbacks. I still find the benefits worth it but that
doesn't mean that does mean that drawbacks are to be liked.
Sometimes social aspect can be used as a counter-measure of
technical flaw.
To stress this point a bit more - constant bikeshedding is
already one the major problems with D development culture.
Everyone has his own opinion about the best syntax sugar or key
features missing. One thing I respect established DMD
contributors for is that they are capable of prioritizing the
bigger picture over own preferences, despite the fact there is
no one actually defining that bigger picture. If anything, I'd
much more appreciate a real full-blown fork with a different
vision (there are actually few already present) than
encouraging a fragmentation over trivialities.
But not everyone wants a full fork, they just want to tweak the
syntax to best suit their preferences. One of the things I like
about D is how it uses the old C-style syntax, so I don't have to
rewire the C-style parser in my head every time I read D code.
Others have different parsers in their heads however. ;)
I've been thinking for some time that the solution to avoid
source code formatting arguments is to have a formatter only show
you source in the format you prefer, whether tabs over spaces or
egyptian braces. Perhaps the same is possible for syntax to a
large extent, ie you download D source and your editor
automatically runs it through a syntax translator so that you see
the syntax you prefer. This doesn't have to be part of the
compiler, it can be done by other tools, though perhaps such
translation tools would likely be built on the DDMD frontend.
Perhaps this is a first step in experimenting with such syntax
translation, or maybe it doesn't go anywhere. Let's not worry
about fragmentation because of some small experiments.
