Broken?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:47:55 -0400, Steve Teale  
<steve.teale at britseyeview.com> wrote:

> What D needs at this point is a dictator. There are about 30 pages of  
> discussion about Walter's std.array.front post, and Steve S's counter  
> post.
>
> It reminds me of the way it was maybe 4 years ago, when there was so  
> much bickering that I just gave up for some time, and went away. Who is  
> going to go through all that stuff, and winnow a compromise out of it.  
> Everyone has a job, or some vital preoccupation with their own project.
>
> The buck has to stop somewhere - is it Walter, or Andrei, or can any  
> proposal or comment be stalled by sheer weight of contrary views?
>
> This is probably a management issue, not a technical one. Trouble is  
> there's no manager, and even if their was, he'd have no minions.
>
> What to do?

But it already is this way. What we have now are the gatekeepers of Walter  
and Andrei, and they (rightfully) hold a very high bar as to what should  
go into the language. They are the dictators, that we get to question and  
debate with. I don't consider it bickering at all.

Debate, and especially heated debate, has always been a part of the  
forums. What else would you expect? Any time you have an open platform for  
discussion, things like this will show up. You can probably just ignore  
it, unless you care. In fact my newsreader has a feature to ignore entire  
threads. I ignore many of them, simply because I don't have the time in  
the day to debate everything. But things I care about, I want to make sure  
my point of view is being expressed, even if it's not me expressing it (in  
this case, nobody seemed to be presenting that view).

This is not a democracy, and it's a good thing that it's not. But it  
absolutely must remain an open platform for people to voice opinions.  
Consider how long Walter resisted the call to make functions final by  
default, until he suddenly switched sides. I think of it like a  
dictatorship with 1000 advisors. And no death squads :)

BTW, I don't expect a compromise, or really any movement, on the string  
issue. At least until someone has the wherewithal and motivation to  
actually try some things out with experimentation, and identify what the  
result might be. Until then, everything is theory. I was actually quite  
surprised Walter even considered fixing the problem to begin with.

-Steve