Handling constructive criticism

Jason House jason.james.house at gmail.com
Wed Apr 16 08:16:50 PDT 2008


I feel like I'm seeing a pattern with how constructive criticism in handled.  Periodically, somebody will take the time to construct these long laundry lists of issues they have with D (the language, the libraries, the community, whatever), and a long thread of discussion ensues.  

Each item in the list tends to spawn it's own thread of discussion.  Usually, this involves a lot of effort to understand why someone made a comment and why.  The response is typically a defense of why stuff is the way it currently is or maybe lamenting about the way things are.

What I don't see is an acknowledgment of the issue and a plan for addressing it.  In the end, good ideas are lost over time as all the good discussion is lost in the newsgroup archives.  I'd love to see stuff ending up in some kind of issue tracker, or, at the very least, assigning someone to handle the issue.

Two threads come to mind.  The most recent one is "why I still won't use D", and the other was posted online at http://www.unknownbrackets.com/tutorials/polishing-d

The latter one did spawn website updates, but I don't really think anything came out of the rest of the discussions.  Maybe I'm wrong and there's something behind the scenes, but the perception is that nothing happened.



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