> Thank you for you encouragement! Please join in to support it **now**!

I wasn't trying to encourage you to fight. Quite the opposite, actually.

In order for swift-evolution to work—to make progress on the language and not 
suck up infinite time—one of the most important things we, as list members, 
must do is know when to stop arguing about something, even when we've lost. And 
the time to argue about this was during the drafting and review of SE-0005. 
There was ample debate on the list about this specific subject, with many 
positions represented.

I was on the side that argued for maximally accurate representation of words, 
including all-caps acronyms even at the beginning of lowercase strings. Others 
argued that the first word of a non-type should always be lowercase; still 
others argued that all letters should be lowercase except for the first one 
after a word boundary, even in an acronym. If we take the example of a "URL 
handler" property and an "HTML string" type, there were people arguing for 
`URLHandler` and `HTMLString`, for `urlHandler` and `HTMLString`, for 
`urlHandler` and `HtmlString`, even for `uRLHandler` and `HTMLString`. And we 
finally settled on the current convention, `urlHandler` and `HTMLString`, 
because it was least offensive to everybody: it kept the initial lowercase 
letter that some people wanted, while also not mixing the case of acronyms and 
giving a decent indicator of word boundaries.

This all took up a week or two of the list's time, and even though I didn't win 
the argument, I don't want to reopen it. It's been argued, it's been settled, 
and we need to move on to other designs. And you know what? `urlHandler` isn't 
*that* bad. It's not what I would have chosen, but it's something I can live 
with.

In general, I do not support reopening designs which have already been settled 
by a formal proposal, review, and core team acceptance, unless the decision is 
either egregiously bad (I can't think of any examples off the top of my head; 
perhaps the issues which led to the `form` prefix might qualify) or later 
experience has shown the design to be worse than previously thought. I will 
fight a design tooth and nail while it's being proposed and reviewed, but once 
it's accepted, I put aside my feelings, accept the proposal as part of the 
language's design, and move on with it. It's the only way we can get anything 
done here.

Rehashing old decisions like this is just spinning our wheels. There are lots 
of exciting new things we *haven't* decided—things like multiline string 
literals, Foundation and Dispatch designs, and a world of syntax clean-ups. 
Let's focus on those things—things where we can make forward progress, not keep 
revisiting old arguments.

-- 
Brent Royal-Gordon
Architechies

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

Reply via email to