What is the goal of this? If the goal is to get people to stop complaining, don't bother, people will always complain. So long as there is a TC-39 there will be people that strive to be armchair language designers and rail against any actual work.
The core problem is that people who work nearly full time on designing a language are necessarily out of touch with people using it, and the people using it are ill equipped to balance the priorities all all the parties involved in designing it. I think a better strategy is for TC-39 to state definitively what is *not* currently working on or is of a very low priority. This would allow the community of people using JavaScript to tackle those problems more directly rather than just waiting. At some point in the future TC-39 can adopt or ratify behavior that has proved itself in the community. I know this process is eluded to often but I don't think you understand how much momentum gets sucked out of the community when they are under the impression that new behavior will be handed down from TC-39 and that their work may fall in conflict or out of date. The recent discussion about Object.isObject is a great example. If this isn't happening please state so definitely so that we can rally around existing work (underscore) or build something new. To be honest, creating better ways for developers to get directly involved in this process is a bad idea. You'll either be bombarded with opinions that haven't been well thought through or you'll gain a crowd of enthusiastic people that stick around long enough to forget their old priorities and come to the same compromises you come to already. It might be beneficial to invite a few people from the developer community to meetings and to rotate them out so that no one becomes truly intrenched in the process. Let's not delude ourselves in to thinking that the only barrier to being a part of the current process is technical and can be solved with indexing or a bulletin board. -Mikeal On May 9, 2012, at May 9, 20124:46 PM, Axel Rauschmayer wrote: > I’m seeing quite a bit of anti-TC39 sentiment out there and I don’t think > it’s fair. Some examples (paraphrasing): > > - “TC39 doesn’t care about web developers and/or doesn’t understand web > development.” > - “TC39 ignores what the people want and designs ‘by committee’.” > - “TC39 is moving too slowly, does too little.” > > The following are counter-points to those opinions: > > - If you want to do good design, it is impossible to please everybody. Design > by popular vote is worse than design by committee. That’s why we have > representative democracies. > > - Evolving the language while remaining backward compatible is a hard > problem. I like what TC39 has done so far. The main goal must be to have as > clean a language as possible in the future. Doing so while being backward > compatible means that the transition can be a little messy (several similar > constructs existing in parallel etc.), but that is unavoidable. One doesn’t > need to understand all the gory details as long is things are simple *in > practice*. > > - TC39 has a lot of responsibility and must keep many parties happy. The > payoff, however, is huge: I’m not aware of any other programming language > that is as open and has as many different, yet highly compatible, > implementations. Hence, moving at a deliberate pace is a good thing. Compare > with how much progress Java has made over the years (in an environment that > is much simpler than JavaScript’s). In that light ES.next’s progress looks > quite good. > > - I find es-discuss quite open and appreciate it as a resource. I see TC39 > members expend a lot of energy and patience in answering as many questions as > possible. Every now and then a question won’t be answered. But that is > understandable, as es-discuss is not a support hotline that has to cover 100% > of the questions. > > What could be improved: > > - Make it easier to search the mailing list archives. Might be a minor thing, > but it would really help. I wonder how Brendan always finds those old threads > that are relevant to a particular topic. > > - Possibly add an FAQ. This could be as simple as collecting all emails that > have long-term explanatory value. > > - I like the idea of having a forum what some people can suggest ideas and > everyone can vote on them. One would need both up-votes and down-votes, as > there is bound to be a lot of troll material. Such a forum can only ever have > an advisory role. But it gives developers the opportunity to vent their > feelings and it gives TC39 popular feedback (including ideas that might not > have come up before). By bundling requests, traffic is reduced. > > - Some complaints are about evolving the standard library (including > collection types). I’ve seen Brendan hint at a strategy for doing so, but I’d > love to read more about it. > > Axel > > -- > Dr. Axel Rauschmayer > [email protected] > > home: rauschma.de > twitter: twitter.com/rauschma > blog: 2ality.com > > _______________________________________________ > es-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
