New DIP73: D Drafting Library

[Zach the Mystic via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 5 February 2015 at 22:08:42 UTC, CraigDillabaugh 
wrote:
> On Thursday, 5 February 2015 at 21:21:22 UTC, Zach the Mystic 
> wrote:
>> On Thursday, 5 February 2015 at 18:44:06 UTC, CraigDillabaugh
> clip
>>
>> You know, I don't even like the use of voting when it comes to 
>> important decisions which last forever. I have no mechanism 
>> for determining fairly who has the right to vote and who 
>> doesn't. Well, speaking more specifically, who is *competent* 
>> to vote and who isn't. D doesn't have a Board of Approved 
>> Members, and so putting something up for vote will let any 
>> shmoe (such as myself) actually have an equal share in the 
>> decision making process.
>>
>> I believe in leadership. Leadership requires both confidence 
>> and humility - confidence to stick up for yourself when you 
>> know you're right, and humility to listen to others when 
>> you're not sure of yourself. Leadership is really hard... but 
>> I think it's necessary in all but the most trivial of cases.
>>
>> Imagine all the people on the spectrum of competence on a 
>> given issue - the most people will be found in the zone of 
>> least competence, and the fewest people in the zone of highest 
>> competence. The only reason for leadership to put something to 
>> a vote is if they can reliably assume that the majority will 
>> have a more competent opinion the issue than they will. There 
>> are only two reasons to do this:
>
> But what about?
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds

Interesting article. There are a lot of opinions about the wisdom 
of crowds right there in the article, some in favor, some more 
skeptical. It seems like in order to get the benefit of crowd 
wisdom, you have to be able to formulate a question in a rather 
simplistic way - asking for a number, or choosing from a short 
list of possibilities. Maybe I'm in favor of leadership here 
because I don't know how such a subtle thing as a language or 
library design decision could be easily formulated into that type 
of simple question.

The leadership here can easily benefit from the wisdom of crowds, 
though - by utilizing the public nature of the internet. At least 
they can rely on whoever has enough motivation to invest time 
voicing his or her opinions here.

Maybe I just prefer leadership for my own personal reasons. The 
wisdom of crowds might be a valid way of making some decisions. 
But I think it would still take a bit of genius to even formulate 
an effective series of questions, for which the wisdom of crowds 
was to be relied upon for the answers. Even that would take quite 
a bit of leadership, since you'll probably agree with me that 
basing important decisions on the crowd's answers to a bad 
question would be a very fast road to software hell indeed!