On Monday, 6 October 2014 at 16:06:04 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
I'm confused. Why would anyone who just comes to dlang.org see
unformed ideas and incomplete designs? Wouldn't newcomers be
more attracted by e.g. stuff coming in the next release?
Because he is interested in language development direction but
does not want to actively participate? It can be someone with bad
early D experience wondering if anything has changed in last
year. Or it can be developer from some company using D wanting to
get quick overview what to expect from the language for the next
year or so.
For example I don't have time to follow Rust mail lists or GitHub
commits but I do read blog posts of its developers regularly
(including speculative ones) to see where it is heading. It is
both interesting and educating and helps to spread the image
among wider audience as well.
The fact that you don't seem to have a consensus with Walter
on some
topic (auto-decoding, yeah) doesn't help either. Language
marketing is
not about posting links on reddit, it is a very hard work of
communicating your vision so that it is clear even to random
by-passer.
I think one good thing we can do is approach things in private
before discussing them publicly.
Agreed. I don't propose to stop paying attention to forums or
drop all discussions but to put a bit more efforts into
popularizing resulting decisions and plans. So that someone can
safely ignore some of discussions without fearing that it will
surprisingly appear in next release catching one off guard.
We now have Martin Nowak as the point of contact.
And what if he gets busy too? :)
Maybe you'll volunteer.
I have already considered that and can be pretty sure this won't
ever happen (at least not while this implies paying to Apple a
single cent)
Let's get it straight - I don't care much about D success in
general. It is a nice language to use here and there, I got an
awesome job because of it but this is pretty much all the scope.
There is no way I will ever work on something that is not needed
to me only because it is important for language success in
general.
This is pretty much the difference between language author / core
developer and random contributor and why handling releases is
safer in the hands of former.
No doubt its design could be done better. But inout was not
motivated theoretically. It came from the practical need of not
duplicating code over qualifiers.
I don't mean feature itself was "theoretical". I mean that it was
implemented and released before it got at least some practical
usage in live projects with relevant feedback and thus have
missed some corner cases.
Sean proposed that. In fact that's a very good success story of
sharing stuff for discussion sooner rather than later: he
answered a Request For Comments with a great comment.
Well when I have initially asked the same question (why not
user-controllable policies?) you straight out rejected it. I must
be very bad at wording questions :(
Again: I don't have a complete design, that's why I'm asking
for comments in the Request For Comments threads. Would you
rather have me come up alone with a complete design and then
show it to the community as a fait accompli? What part of
"let's do this together" I need to clarify?
"let's do this together" implies agreeing on some base to further
work on. When I come and see that proposed solution does not
address a problem I have at all I can't do anything but ask "how
is this supposed to address my problem?" because that is _your_
proposal and I am not gifted with telepathy. Especially because
you have stated that previous proposal (range-fication) which did
fix the issue _for me_ is not on the table anymore.
You risk balkanization by keeping the things as they are. We
do have
talks at work sometimes that simply forking the language may
be a more
practical approach than pushing necessary breaking changes
upstream by
the time D2 port is complete. Those are just talks of course
and until
porting is done it is all just speculations but it does
indicate certain
level of unhappinness.
It would be terrific if Sociomantic would improve its
communication with the community about their experience with D
and their needs going forward.
How about someone starts paying attention to what Don posts? That
could be an incredible start. I spend great deal of time both
reading this NG (to be aware of what comes next) and writing (to
express both personal and Sociomantic concerns) and have
literally no idea what can be done to make communication more
clear.
Have you ever considered starting a blog about your vision of D
development to communicate it better to wider audience? :)
Yah, apparently there's no shortage of ideas of things I should
work on. Perhaps I should do the same. Dicebot, I think you
should work on making exceptions refcounted :o).
As soon as it becomes a priority issue for me or Sociomantic
(likely latter as I don't do much private D stuff anymore).
However your attempt to be sarcastic here does indicate that you
have totally missed the point I was stressing in original
comment. Writing a blog post once in a few months is hardly an
effort comparable to reimplementing exceptions management but is
much more important long term because no one but you can do it.
In this sense, yes, it is much more pragmatical to wait for
someone like me to work on reference counted exceptions and for
you to focus on communication instead. Worst thing that can
happen is that nothing gets done which is still better than
something unexpected and disruptive getting done.
