On Tuesday, March 18, 2003, at 06:49 AM, Paul wrote:
Merely for the one small thing I might possibly contribute.... Would it be useful to have a convenient place to do polls? I suspect there already is one somewhere, but I'm unaware of it. I don't want to undermine the authority of the core planning team, but thought they might like to have a simple way to survey for things that are more preference than major issue.
The (now very outdated!) POOC pages at http://cog.cognitivity.com/perl6/ have polls attached to each recipe. If nothing else, let me know and I can easily add a few. They contain the caveat that you must register to vote, as a way to prevent ballot stuffing.
The POOC polls were an experiment. They tentatively demonstrated that (a) while hundreds of people visited those pages, pretty much NONE of them voted, and (b) we all like bitching a heck of a lot more than we like deciding. ;-)
So dunno. We might try a few, but I'm not sure the results would be very useful. The design team has proven repeatedly that they have a terrific handle on the various issues, and there's been quite a few things that, if left to the prevailing popular opinion, would have led to distinctly the WRONG decision being made.
The most productive (though not necessarily painless!) approach I've personally witnessed is when the design team muses about ideas, the list argues back and forth for a while, then the design team comes down with an Edict From On High that takes those issues into account. If people are *really* convinced it's wrong, the argument continues for a while, but it usually gets shut down when most of the list is satisfied that all the arguments have been heard.
As much as people hated it, I think the P6 Operators thread was *quite* beneficial. It lead to the saving of ^ xor, and the >>hyper<< syntax, and quite a few other improvements, and got things pinned down squarely. I wouldn't mind seeing more of that level of disciplined debate, but it's difficult to pull off.
MikeL
