Wed Oct 17 - Avoiding Code Smells by Walter Bright

[unprotected-entity]

On Thursday, 1 November 2018 at 23:58:15 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
> Having said that, though, there are some here who *do* want 
> something like what you describe... IIRC Manu has voiced this 
> before, and there may be others. (I myself don't consider it a 
> big enough issue to be worth agonizing over.)  So far, there 
> has yet to be a strong enough argument for per-aggregate 
> private to convince Walter & Andrei.  It's them you have to 
> convince, not the rest of us.  Even if we were to all agree 
> with you, it doesn't mean squat if Walter and Andrei won't 
> budge on the issue.

Again, I feel it's Walter and Andrei that should be doing the 
convincing.. they are always silent on this matter, which is a 
real shame,as I think their insights might actually be useful ;-)

If it's simply not practical, from a language design, to consider 
this further, then I'd like to know that - I work at a higher 
leve of abstraction and have no idea about this. So not hearing 
from Walter or Andrei, is really unhelpful, as to whether it's an 
idea worth pursuing, or an idea that Walter and Andrei would 
never accept - which is it?

Anyway, the real 'problem' (in my opinion), is not the idea. The 
idea is sound (or at least, it's not unsound), and it's 
represented in all major langauges, already.

The real problem, is that whenever this idea pops up (as it has, 
and will continue to do so), far too many people on this forum 
attempt to divert the discussion from 'what is the usefulness of 
this new idea' to 'what's the difficulty of finding ways to avoid 
any change.'

The discussion can never move forward under those circumstances.

I would like the discussion to move forwards, and people start to 
think about how such a change could be adopted, how difficult it 
would be to implement, how will it play with other features in 
the langauge..etc....

It's a real shame we can't get beyond "No. We don't like your 
idea, and even if we did, we don't want to do it".