Bill Baxter wrote:
On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Andrei
Alexandrescu<[email protected]> wrote:
aarti_pl wrote:
What would you do if you were me?
Andrei
You should just accept what others want *although* you don't agree...
Steve's arguments are very good and convincing, and unfortunately somehow
you don't get them. And I don't see your arguments being superior at all.
I do get his arguments. Not being convinced does not mean I don't understand
them. You seem to assume that as soon as I understood his arguments I'd
automatically agree, so somehow I don't understand them
I think the expectation is more that you would address or respond to
his argument rather than making your own argument again.
Or say something like this:
The fundamental difference in our viewpoints is that you believe that
expressing extra semantic information to people who read the code is
more valuable that saving some typing. I believe the opposite.
(feel free to rewrite as you wish) Then it is clear that you have
understood his argument and have some idea how and where the
difference in opinion really comes from. Simply repeating your
argument makes it look as though you have not read his.
Well we both repeated our arguments several times :o). And don't forget:
I don't get to decide. So such a discussion between Steve and me could
as well be a discussion between any two participants.
I do have accountability for Phobos, and there haven't been huge debates
about it that I vetoed against, have there?
Sorry for thread hijacking, but such discussions make me want not to use D
any more... I am writing because I still have some hope...
D has great features, and probably less warts than most other languages. I
understand how you feel, but I'd also hope that realistically your use of
the language hinges on a little more than this one issue.
I don't think it's this one issue he's talking about. I think the
issue is an occasionally repeated history of questionable changes in D
made in the face of strong community opposition. Like
foreach_reverse. Such choices may be perfectly valid, but if you find
yourself repeatedly not seeing eye-to-eye with the designers of a
language, you have to wonder if you're in the right language
community.
I understand. On the other hand, a lot of good things have been done in
relative silence, which are likely to positively impact code writing
experience a great deal. They just need some more riping. For example, I
consider the recently-introduced value range propagation an excellent
feature and a well-balanced engineering tradeoff. Such a thing *would*
be the kind of feature that would make me cast an interested eye over a
language. Finally, a step forward in the always-muddy world of
fixed-size integer arithmetic. Then probably I'd try value range
propagation and see the compiler essentially fail for all cases (Walter,
Walter... I wonder if you had *any* test case for the thing) and then
give up in frustration.
Andrei
