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?

Steve

On Tuesday, 11 March 2014 at 17:47:56 UTC, Steve Teale 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?
>
> Steve

The buck does stop with Walter and Andrei. What you're seeing is community discussion, which informs their ultimate decisions. Are you saying that people shouldn't be discussing language decisions and that it should just be left to a couple of people?

Also, of course Walter can decide not to do something due to community pressure. He has the ultimate say, it's his language, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't listen.

On Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:47:55 -0400, Steve Teale <steve.teale@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

On Tuesday, 11 March 2014 at 18:01:23 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
>
> The buck does stop with Walter and Andrei. What you're seeing is community discussion, which informs their ultimate decisions. Are you saying that people shouldn't be discussing language decisions and that it should just be left to a couple of people?
>
> Also, of course Walter can decide not to do something due to community pressure. He has the ultimate say, it's his language, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't listen.

I'm probably thinking more of some organization where if a discussion went off scale, something would happen, like a vote on the 3 main protagonists.

If those 3 were not willing or able to get together and come up with a compromise, then the status quo should prevail until W/A decide otherwise.

Lacking some compromise of that sort, D just becomes Balkanized. It did, and it recovered, but I think it sets things back.

Steve

On Tuesday, 11 March 2014 at 18:14:52 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:47:55 -0400, Steve Teale

Functions final by default? I read the list of changes for 2.065, and that one got by me completely.

Aargh!

Steven Schveighoffer píše v Út 11. 03. 2014 v 14:14 -0400:

> 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 :)

What is the current status of this?

On Tuesday, 11 March 2014 at 18:29:35 UTC, Steve Teale wrote:
> On Tuesday, 11 March 2014 at 18:14:52 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> On Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:47:55 -0400, Steve Teale
>
> Functions final by default? I read the list of changes for 2.065, and that one got by me completely.
>
> Aargh!

Not in 2.065
2.066  will introduce "virtual" keyword
2.067+ will change the defaults if it will still be considered good idea

On Tuesday, 11 March 2014 at 17:47:56 UTC, Steve Teale 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?
>
> Steve

I like it. :) It's Walter's project and he solicited opinions.  Maybe they change his mind, maybe they don't.  In this case, it appears they did: he seems to have decided that the breakage wouldn't be worth the speedup.  What would you prefer, that Walter The Dictator did it anyway?  That's not how communities work.

There is no doubt that the buck stops with the core team.  If people don't like their decisions, they can and will leave or who knows, fork.  If you want someone willing to go against the grain, I have seen others here accuse Walter of being stubborn in the past.  I don't think you can say he simply goes with the crowd. ;)

I will agree with you on one point though.  It's not particularly clear to an outsider what the decision-making process is with D, ie what the deliberative process is and who ultimately decides.  If you've been around long enough and check the github pull requests and commits, you can get a sense of it, but the roles are not really defined.  I understand most open-source projects work this way, but D is probably big enough now that some exposition is helpful.

I think it'd be nice to have a page on dlang.org, whether on the main site or the wiki, that laid out who the core team is, sort of like a masthead in a magazine, with a paragraph or two about each person.  This would give newcomers some bearings on who the core team is, what their roles are, and what they do for the project.  I'm sure anyone could figure all this out on their own eventually, with enough time spent on the newsgroup and looking at source commits, but the idea is to save them some time.  Just my suggestion.

On Tuesday, 11 March 2014 at 18:35:57 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> On Tuesday, 11 March 2014 at 18:29:35 UTC, Steve Teale wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 11 March 2014 at 18:14:52 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>> On Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:47:55 -0400, Steve Teale
>>
>> Functions final by default? I read the list of changes for 2.065, and that one got by me completely.
>>
>> Aargh!
>
> Not in 2.065
> 2.066  will introduce "virtual" keyword
> 2.067+ will change the defaults if it will still be considered good idea

Well if we're going there, we should go the whole hog and have final, direct, and virtual. It's a system programming language, so you should be able to walk down the street naked as long as you are prepared to put up with the consequences.

Steve

11-Mar-2014 21:47, Steve Teale пишет:
> 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.
>
Good management hardly ever won a contest in design.

-- 
Dmitry Olshansky