Hello D community,


I use D professionally from some months back.  Posting as anonymous to avoid opening debates at work.  I come from a Scala-Java-Python background and in many ways D is a breathe of fresh air.  True in others is not which is expected.  Also started following the github stream of work because we are interested in a few bugfixes in language-and phobos-space.  Not much on forums but have been active in other languages similar forums and on occasions in their official meetups.

I looked at the conference and AGM on video because it is related to my day job.  I have had hopes about the AGM but it was a bit disappointing due to a few things.  Feed back inspired from similar meetings I saw:

- Formalism is very important and it is great that Walter and Andrei insist on it.  Python PEP are very informal and the process is argumentative.  Java and Scala are better and should give inspiration.

- The DIPS discussion was too long.  DIP 1000 needs more documentation but that should be one minute decision.  DIP 1015 is not very important, why discuss it again? All languages have things like this and I like D bool more than verbose Java boolean.  But it does not matter anyway!  DIP 1016 was the interesting but was not discussed.  No discussion about the DIPS pipeline which is the most important!

- The vision part was also too long and too few clear conclusion.  A lot of important things not discussed.

- Form of meeting was.....  much to be improved.  Anyone could hold the microphone for any time and say whatever.  No filter and honest some people said too little in too much (not sure how to express).  Many words with little content.  The person at https://youtu.be/cpTAtiboIDs?t=4462 loves to hear himself.  There should be a limit.  In such meetings the moderator needs to control it, and they did a poor job.

- Meeting should not be with time limit.  All items must be discussed and it ends when topics end.  Why only two hours for so many items?

- Items came in random order.  If there is a time limit most important topics must come first.  Most meeting was on minor things!

- Speaking of meeting moderator, who was that? Mike, Ethan or Nick? The moderator/s did a bad job at making the meeting work.  One problem is Nick was not organized and difficult to understand even.  More complicated is I don't understand Nicks role.  Was he chosen by the D foundation?  If so I suggest he is replaced for next year.  If not I did not see a process of election by the community.  Does it means he appointed himself?  Anyone can do that by collecting a random list of popular topics and saying he will hold an AGM?  That would be an even bigger problem.

This is my list.  It is in random order too!  Most important:  make time for all topics.  Discuss important topics first.  Moderation should limit time with the microphone and move the meeting forward such that everything is discussed.

On Monday, 13 May 2019 at 05:27:00 UTC, Johan Coder wrote:
> - Form of meeting was.....  much to be improved.  Anyone could hold the microphone for any time and say whatever. No filter and honest some people said too little in too much (not sure how to express).  Many words with little content.  The person at https://youtu.be/cpTAtiboIDs?t=4462 loves to hear himself.

Please don't call people out like this. It's rude, offputting, and in any case you are not the moderator.

Anyways, I have no idea what you want the organizers to do about it. Make visitors preregister their questions?

> - Speaking of meeting moderator, who was that? Mike, Ethan or Nick? The moderator/s did a bad job at making the meeting work.
>  One problem is Nick was not organized and difficult to understand even.  More complicated is I don't understand Nicks role.  Was he chosen by the D foundation?  If so I suggest he is replaced for next year.  If not I did not see a process of election by the community.  Does it means he appointed himself?
>  Anyone can do that by collecting a random list of popular topics and saying he will hold an AGM?  That would be an even bigger problem.

History isn't made by those most qualified, but by those who bothered to show up.

That said, yes, absolutely anyone can collect a random list of popular topics and say they will hold an AGM. Of course, the problem is getting people to pay attention...

Am 13.05.19 um 07:27 schrieb Johan Coder:
> Hello D community,
> 
> 
> I use D professionally from some months back.  Posting as anonymous to avoid opening debates at work.  I come from a Scala-Java-Python background and in many ways D is a breathe of fresh air.  True in others is not which is expected.  Also started following the github stream of work because we are interested in a few bugfixes in language-and phobos-space.  Not much on forums but have been active in other languages similar forums and on occasions in their official meetups.
> 
> I looked at the conference and AGM on video because it is related to my day job.  I have had hopes about the AGM but it was a bit disappointing due to a few things.  Feed back inspired from similar meetings I saw:
> 
> - Formalism is very important and it is great that Walter and Andrei insist on it.  Python PEP are very informal and the process is argumentative.  Java and Scala are better and should give inspiration.
> 
> - The DIPS discussion was too long.  DIP 1000 needs more documentation but that should be one minute decision.  DIP 1015 is not very important, why discuss it again? All languages have things like this and I like D bool more than verbose Java boolean.  But it does not matter anyway! DIP 1016 was the interesting but was not discussed.  No discussion about the DIPS pipeline which is the most important!
> 
> - The vision part was also too long and too few clear conclusion.  A lot of important things not discussed.
> 
> - Form of meeting was.....  much to be improved.  Anyone could hold the microphone for any time and say whatever.  No filter and honest some people said too little in too much (not sure how to express).  Many words with little content.  The person at https://youtu.be/cpTAtiboIDs?t=4462 loves to hear himself.  There should be a limit.  In such meetings the moderator needs to control it, and they did a poor job.
> 
> - Meeting should not be with time limit.  All items must be discussed and it ends when topics end.  Why only two hours for so many items?
> 
> - Items came in random order.  If there is a time limit most important topics must come first.  Most meeting was on minor things!
> 
> - Speaking of meeting moderator, who was that? Mike, Ethan or Nick? The moderator/s did a bad job at making the meeting work.  One problem is Nick was not organized and difficult to understand even.  More complicated is I don't understand Nicks role.  Was he chosen by the D foundation?  If so I suggest he is replaced for next year.  If not I did not see a process of election by the community.  Does it means he appointed himself?  Anyone can do that by collecting a random list of popular topics and saying he will hold an AGM?  That would be an even bigger problem.
> 
> This is my list.  It is in random order too!  Most important:  make time for all topics.  Discuss important topics first.  Moderation should limit time with the microphone and move the meeting forward such that everything is discussed.

I mostly agree with this. To be honest, when I first saw the agenda for the AGM and the time that was allocated to the AGM, I was in shock: It is simply too much to discuss in that amount of time. It actually turned out much better than I expected but we still had to cut the complete list of genral topics due to lack of time.

I think the problems with the meeting boil down to a few points:

1. Unclear purpose

At least from what I understand, the meeting did not serve any specific purpose and it did also not set any clear expectations. Is this meeting just an extended form of the "Ask us Anything!" panel, just with a predefined agenda? Or is something where we can actually try to make some decisions or at least find some sort of conensus on some things?

2. Missing form

There was absolutley no form to the meeting. As the previous poster also
mentioned, it was basically "go through a list of points and whoever
wants to say something to a point just does so". This sort of meeting
form is _very_ ineffective and inefficient. The previous poster made
some good suggestions already but there is a lot more that can be improved.

3. Missing structure in the agenda

This also has already been said by the previous poster. Basically it was just a list of points grouped more or less randomly. I believe this is due to how the list was assembled (Nicholas just included all issues with D, the D community and the process of how D is developed he could think of and also all pointer that others suggested to him should be added to the list) but also due to the nature of the list: The topics are quite diverse, e.g. there were language related issues but also process related issues. It is non trivial how to even create a meaningful structure to _all_ of these topics and I believe that simply not enough time has been spent on that.

4. Unclear roles

This has also been said already in some form. Who is the moderator (and
relating back to my seond point, what is the job of the moderator)? What
are Walter's and Andrei's (well, from now on Atila's instead) role in
the meeting. What was Nicholas' role? What about the comminity's? I
believe one problem in particular with moderation was that the moderator
should be as neutral as possible and focus on the process of the meeting
instead of making his own point. Mike and Ethan tried this and did a
fairly good job, but you noticed that Nicholas struggled with that
because he feels strongly about many of the topics. This is not meant as
an offense at all, it just means that Nicholas was not qualified to be a
moderator for this meeting.
Also why did we not have any official recorder? I know that the meeting
was recorded on video but for things like this it is important to
document the _results_ in a way that can easily be acted upon and that
is much easier with a written record. Now we basically only have the
notes that some of us took...



Going forward, if we are to repeat the AGM next year, I believe we need to address these issues. In particular, we need to:

1. Define a clear purpose for the AGM.
2. Define a clear form / structure for the meeting.
3. Create a much better structured agenda (this could also mean that we
simply need to explicitly exclude some of the points).
4. Define who is responsible for what in the AGM.

This list is ordered by how important I believe the points to be but I firmly believe that we need to address all of them.

I hope this helps in making the AGM a bigger success next time.

Best regards,
Johannes

On Monday, 13 May 2019 at 07:34:45 UTC, Johannes Loher wrote:
> 1. Define a clear purpose for the AGM.

IIRC it was said before that conferences are beer parties with a hope they will understand something from body language what they couldn't say in text.

On Monday, 13 May 2019 at 07:34:45 UTC, Johannes Loher wrote:
[...]
> Going forward, if we are to repeat the AGM next year, I believe we need to address these issues. In particular, we need to:
>
> 1. Define a clear purpose for the AGM.
> 2. Define a clear form / structure for the meeting.
> 3. Create a much better structured agenda (this could also mean that we
> simply need to explicitly exclude some of the points).
> 4. Define who is responsible for what in the AGM.
>
> This list is ordered by how important I believe the points to be but I firmly believe that we need to address all of them.
>
> I hope this helps in making the AGM a bigger success next time.
>
> Best regards,
> Johannes

The vision documents have not been working very well. The vision was good, but they were not a very good indication of where the language is going and what is being worked on and how. One purpose of the AGM is that its records (I believe that Mike will work on those) are hoped to replace the vision documents as a more accurate and useful indication of where D is going, what its vitality is etc. As this was the first AGM in this form, I don't find it surprising that there are things to improve upon. I think it worked out pretty well, and want to thank Nicholas for his initiative. I think having a public AGM helps a lot to reach a more harmonious and unified working community. Otherwise these topics are discussed/complained about in the corridors within their respective bubbles where they don't achieve much. To all those criticising the agenda: it has been out there for comments for a long time, but I dont think Nicholas has received much feedback.

Bastiaan.

On Monday, 13 May 2019 at 09:11:51 UTC, Bastiaan Veelo wrote:
>
> The vision documents have not been working very well. The vision was good, but they were not a very good indication of where the language is going and what is being worked on and how. One purpose of the AGM is that its records (I believe that Mike will work on those) are hoped to replace the vision documents as a more accurate and useful indication of where D is going, what its vitality is etc. As this was the first AGM in this form, I don't find it surprising that there are things to improve upon. I think it worked out pretty well, and want to thank Nicholas for his initiative. I think having a public AGM helps a lot to reach a more harmonious and unified working community. Otherwise these topics are discussed/complained about in the corridors within their respective bubbles where they don't achieve much. To all those criticising the agenda: it has been out there for comments for a long time, but I dont think Nicholas has received much feedback.
>
> Bastiaan.

A couple of started to move the vision document into the issue tracker of this
https://github.com/dlang/projects github project. We also created a couple of major milestones, individual issues should be associated with.

The idea here is that, we use the same tools we manage programming languages with for the english language.
If you think about it, what is a vision document. I would say it is a program written in a very ambiguous programming language. So why not use the same tool we all already know?

Next years AGM agenda will then be trivial to prepare.

I'm going to preface this by saying that I have/had no experience running an AGM and that there were a lot of topics

On Monday, 13 May 2019 at 05:27:00 UTC, Johan Coder wrote:
> - The DIPS discussion was too long.  DIP 1000 needs more documentation but that should be one minute decision.

The problem was not that dip1000 was under-documented it was the process by which it happened, specifically on the reviewing side where there is no document to refer to what it is supposed to be doing.

> DIP 1015 is not very important, why discuss it again? All languages have things like this and I like D bool more than verbose Java boolean.

Because the entire community though that the decision and the chain of reasoning was... bad, to put it mildly, and we need a process in place for dealing with such an outcome.

> But it does not matter anyway!  DIP 1016 was the interesting but was not discussed.

DIP 1016 was discussed a lot at the conference so there was less need to cover it in as much depth.

> No discussion about the DIPS pipeline which is the most important!

I'm pretty sure that was discussed.

> In such meetings the moderator needs to control it, and they did a poor job.

perhaps, again, first time doing it. The items were ordered by priority, so not so bad, but I take you point.

> - Meeting should not be with time limit.  All items must be discussed and it ends when topics end.  Why only two hours for so many items?

Alas, it was all we had. I originally wanted to split it over where the "Ask Us Anything" slot ended up and the Saturday morning, because I think that that is not a particularly useful session (and they serve similar roles), but apparently tradition demands that session. Though it will be interesting to see if it continues with Atila at the helm.

> - Items came in random order. If there is a time limit most important topics must come first.

Again it was ordered by priority.

> Most meeting was on minor things!

I don't think that was the case. Keep in mind that other things were discussed throughout the conference.

> - Speaking of meeting moderator, who was that? Mike, Ethan or Nick? The moderator/s did a bad job at making the meeting work.
>  One problem is Nick was not organized and difficult to understand even.  More complicated is I don't understand Nicks role.

I wrote the agenda.

> Was he chosen by the D foundation?  [Did] he appointed himself?
>  Anyone can do that by collecting a random list of popular topics and saying he will hold an AGM?

Sort of, I submitted it as a DConf proposal. It was accepted.

> That would be an even bigger problem.

The fact that we had one is an achievement. I don't think it would have happened otherwise.

> If so I suggest he is replaced for next year.

Why, are you volunteering?

> This is my list.  It is in random order too!  Most important:  make time for all topics.  Discuss important topics first.  Moderation should limit time with the microphone and move the meeting forward such that everything is discussed.

Noted.

I just want to say thanks, I think that the AGM was a success.
A lot more was done and solved than I was expecting.

On Monday, 13 May 2019 at 05:27:00 UTC, Johan Coder wrote:
> I use D professionally from some months back.  Posting as anonymous to avoid opening debates at work.

What?

> - Speaking of meeting moderator, who was that? Mike, Ethan or Nick? The moderator/s did a bad job at making the meeting work.
>  One problem is Nick was not organized and difficult to understand even.

So you decided to go anonymous but on the other hand you expose people's name and pointing their (According your opinion) mistakes.

I think this is rude and shameful.

Matheus.

On Monday, 13 May 2019 at 13:27:51 UTC, matheus wrote:
> On Monday, 13 May 2019 at 05:27:00 UTC, Johan Coder wrote:
>> I use D professionally from some months back.  Posting as anonymous to avoid opening debates at work.
>
> What?
>
>> - Speaking of meeting moderator, who was that? Mike, Ethan or Nick? The moderator/s did a bad job at making the meeting work.
>>  One problem is Nick was not organized and difficult to understand even.
>
> So you decided to go anonymous but on the other hand you expose people's name and pointing their (According your opinion) mistakes.

This is not exposing. He was out there with known name. Anonymous people criticized others all the time. Like Walter or Andrei.

> I think this is rude and shameful.

I think this is clueless.