iterators again

[Jarrett Billingsley]

"David B. Held" <dheld at codelogicconsulting.com> wrote in message 
news:f3f43e$1lth$1 at digitalmars.com...
> If you want D to develop as quickly as C++, then Design by Committee is a 
> great idea.  When does C++0x come out?  2009?  If you want to hear the 
> status straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak, move to Seattle, 
> where you can stalk him in person. ;)

:P

> If you notice, Walter does solicit public feedback directly from time to 
> time, but you may also notice that it takes a long time for a feature to 
> go from idea to implementation.  If he announced every thought he or 
> someone else had about a feature while it was being designed, you'd find 
> that most of it is noise or confusing.  If you multiply that by the number 
> of people on the NG, I guarantee that absolutely nothing would get done. 
> It's simply a matter of pragmatism to meet with people face-to-face to 
> help flesh out ideas, because the bandwidth is much higher and it's easier 
> to filter out the noise.

Sounds like a good place for a D development blog.  Walter could post saying 
what's on his mind for D development, and that could be a starting place for 
discussion on the NGs, not even necessarily with Walter involved.  It would 
also let people know what could be coming soon, so they don't spend time 
trying to come up with some horrendous hack to work around the lack of a 
feature that's coming soon.

What's a bit weird is that sometimes some feature will just come out of 
nowhere, with no announcement, no pre-discussion, no communication 
whatsoever besides a bullet on the "what's new with DMD 1.xxx" page.  And 
they're not always trivial features either -- import() and mixin() 
expressions, struct literals, scope() statements, and nested classes were 
all "well OK, never saw that one coming" features.

> But I will say this: Walter is influenced more by libraries that he thinks 
> are cool or important than by many other considerations, and insists that 
> features those libraries need to survive and thrive be given extra 
> priority.  So people who want to lobby for a pet feature can do so most 
> effectively by producing a significant library that demonstrates the need 
> for the feature.  It seems only natural that if there isn't a significant 
> use case, the value of a feature is unproven.

Walter also seems to be influenced by certain people more than others, which 
is more than a little disturbing.