On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 20:08:13 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> reasons not to invent another file format.

BTW this is really a straw-man: the SDLang was *not* invented by the vibe.d team.

On 11/25/2015 03:06 PM, Jack Stouffer wrote:
> On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 19:25:18 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> As Walter said a few times by now, inventing new languages is an
>> endeavor of high fixed cost for everyone involved (including users)
>> and shouldn't be done casually.
>>
>> Please don't reply to this. Just throw SDL away and use JSON. Please
>> don't waste time discussing it.
>
> While I agree with you, we shouldn't become the Go community either.
> Saying "let's not discuss this" seems very against the values of the D
> community.

That's right, but we're kind of in the other extreme of the spectrum so a bit of pressure is in order.

FWIW I'm more curt and a bit less active in forums because I'm working on the new containers library. Design by Introspection is beyond exhilarating. If things are turning the way I hope, it will be the best container library ever.

I need to trust our core contributors here to make the right high-level decisions and execute them accurately when I'm not looking. Hence my brief comment that inventing a new file format should not have happened and must be now undone. If Walter or I were paying attention, that wouldn't have been initiated in the first place. But we can't pay attention to everything at all time. Please exercise good judgment and focused execution at all times. If it offers no leverage, entails boring work, requires a manual, or doesn't look good on the page - it's probably wrong.

Feel free to email Walter and me if you need executive decisions (I have a few in my queue, thanks to those who wrote). I answer all, just slowly. If too slow, email me again.

Happy Thanksgiving to whom it applies!


Andrei

On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 20:24:36 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> I need to trust our core contributors here to make the right high-level decisions and execute them accurately when I'm not looking. Hence my brief comment that inventing a new file format should not have happened and must be now undone. If Walter or I were paying attention, that wouldn't have been initiated in the first place.

To be fair, they _didn't_ invent a new format. They just picked one that's far less well-known than what they were using before. Now, arguably, it's still a bad idea, because SDL is nowhere near as well-known as JSON, but they didn't invent it.

Though the fact that the site that seems to be the main site for SDL is down right now, isn't exactly encouraging:

http://sdl.ikayzo.org

So, while SDL wasn't invented by the dub team, its reach beyond them does not appear to be large.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 20:24:36 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> If it offers no leverage, entails boring work, requires a manual, or doesn't look good on the page - it's probably wrong.

Interestingly, this applies to the JSON-based DUB configuration format much more so than to the SDL-based one.

 — David

On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 10:17:02 UTC, Suliman wrote:
> If SDL will stay by default I will prefer to move to any other build system or will downgrade to old version of DUB.

I made my thoughts clear in the original discussion. Please dump SDL and just use Json.

Json is clear, concise, everyone and his dog knows it and their IDE recognises it.

On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 19:25:18 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> As Walter said a few times by now, inventing new languages is an endeavor of high fixed cost for everyone involved (including users) and shouldn't be done casually.
>
> Please don't reply to this. Just throw SDL away and use JSON. Please don't waste time discussing it.
>

I just about decided to quietly move on and not let this get to me but I can't seem to. I think it's important to say that I found this comment rude and highly atypical of this community at large. "Shut up and do what I say" from the language architect doesn't exactly foster an excited and healthy community.

This is the second time I've seen you do this recently[1] and both have been very disheartening to read.

1. https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/5239#issuecomment-157031984

On 11/25/15 11:40 AM, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 19:29:43 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 19:18:25 UTC, Brad Anderson wrote:
>>> Tools should be querying dub directly instead of trying to read the package format.
>>
>> Shouldn't this be true of writing it too? Like I said on irc earlier today, I actually kinda think
>> we should have some kind of gui for it, or at least a command suite (like `dub add-dependency foo`
>> maybe, idk) so the file itself never needs to be touched directly by users for common tasks.
>
> While having a GUI might be nice, we're talking about a config file here. This is exactly the sort
> of thing that's normally edited by hand. It should be both writable and readable by both programmers
> and programs.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

I'm not well steeped in the DUB eco-system, but isn't it more than just a config file?  It's really more of an interface file, right?  Config files are internal to apps, and this is shared between packages and the central registry.

For those saying that one should use DUB as the only access method to this date, are you serious? People (and applications) should have to execute an app to interrogate the data store?  Can you name a few other config files you do that with?  One of the only ones I can think of is the windows registry, and that's an api, not an app.

Later,
Brad

On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 19:05:15 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> The main problem with SDL is it's name. It's not an overly popular project - it
>> doesn't even have an article in Wikipedia. That alone is not a problem - if we
>> had something against non-mainstream project we wouldn't be using D - the
>> problem with SDL's lack of popularity shares it's initials with "Simple
>> DirectMedia Layer" - a super-popular project with binding for most languages.
>> This makes it very hard to google for Dimple Declarative Languae - because most
>> of the things you'll find are about Simple DirectMedia Layer.
>
>
> If you google "D programming language SDL" you'll find it.

I just did - and all the first page results were about "Simple DirectMedia Layer". The second page had two results that have something to do with "Simple Declarative Language" - but they weren't landing pages or anything, just source codes that happened to deal with DUB(https://travis-ci.org/D-Programming-Language/dub-registry and https://coveralls.io/files/917374709).

Google search results are a bit customized, so other people might get better results, but I still believe SDL is extremely unsearchable.

On 11/25/2015 04:39 PM, Brad Anderson wrote:
> "Shut up and do what I say" from the language architect doesn't exactly
> foster an excited and healthy community.

It's more like "Do this, no need to argue". There's really no need, and we're arguing too much over too little. -- Andrei

On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 19:12:43 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 11/25/2015 02:02 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 11/25/2015 7:25 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>>> The files are very short, and you don't have to deal with them much.
>>
>> That makes for an even less of a case for inventing a new file format. I
>> suppose it's water under the bridge, though.
>
> It's not. To DUB maintainers: this is a strategic error. Please throw SDL away and use a standardized file format. -- Andrei

And in what domain is json considered a standardized -configuration- file format?