B Revzin - if const expr isn't broken (was Re: My Meeting C++ Keynote video is now available)

[Walter Bright]

On 1/17/2019 11:31 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> [...]

Thanks for the thoughtful and well-written piece.

But there is a counterpoint: symmetry in mathematics is one thing, but symmetry 
in human intuition is not. Anytime one is dealing in human interfaces, one runs 
into this. I certainly did with the way imports worked in D. The lookups worked 
exactly the same for any sort of symbol lookup. I thought it was great.

But I was unable to explain it to others. Nobody could understand it when I said 
imported symbol lookup worked exactly like any lookup in a name space. They 
universally said it was "unintuitive", filed bug reports, etc. Eventually, I had 
to give it up. Now import lookup follows special different rules, people are 
happy, and I learned (again) that symmetry doesn't always produce the best outcomes.

User interfaces (and programming languages certainly are user interfaces) are 
hard and (ironically) are anything but intuitive to design.