Trip notes from Israel

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Friday, 26 May 2017 at 16:55:44 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Friday, 26 May 2017 at 11:32:21 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
> wrote:
>> Walter and I have implicitly fostered a kind of meritocracy 
>> whereby it's the point/argument that matters.

I don't see any evidence of this statement being true. 
Unfortunately.

> That's because that's all that matters.  It is what almost 
> every worthwhile organization aspires to, though very few get 
> there.  Doing anything else would be a mistake.

True.

> Of course, like anything, debate can be overdone and you're 
> probably right that it has been at times here.  But an open 
> source project is a fundamentally different thing than a 
> startup, it requires much more community involvement and 
> deliberation.

Right,  feedback and arguments about semantics are good, feedback 
on usability or integration problems are good.

What is not good is lifting out design-issues into small packages 
and trying to fix them one-by-one with a strong emphasis on 
implementation cost.

Democracy is great for building big things if the vision is clear 
and shared.

Democracy is great for pointing out where the systemic problems 
are.

Democracy is great for adapting something that is complete to new 
use cases.

Democracy is not great for innovation, designing new solution, 
creating good UI experiences or even engineering...

So, why-oh-why so much effort on writing DIPs on stuff like 
pre/post condition syntax? This has to be designed into a whole 
and would be better done by a small team of designers taking the 
_problems_ into account consulting experts on the specifics of 
the area. But if you want expertise you actually have to be 
interested in learning about that topic instead of defending what 
is there already.

Anyway, if people sense that semantic changes are too hard to get 
through I guess they will aim for something that is on the 
surface (like "body"). As a symbolic act to see if change is at 
all possible.

But it is rather inconsequential and rather inefficient use of 
resources. Which will happen to any project without a list of 
priorities.