Wait, what? What is AliasSeq?

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 17 July 2015 at 10:15:05 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
> On Friday, 17 July 2015 at 00:08:42 UTC, Tofu Ninja wrote:
>> Well this was 214 replies of wasted time...
>
> Just b/c the outcome is the same doesn't mean the discussion 
> was pointless.
> We reached at least some sort of consensus which should prevent 
> any future complaints about the chosen name.

No, you did not reach consensus, and there will be future 
complaints about the terminology used in D (unless the language 
dies). If you pick inconsistent terminology that breaks 
established usage, people will complain…

So it was wasted time. And more time will be wasted the same way, 
due to a lack of process.

If you want consistency you need 2-4 people who know the field 
really well and reach actual consensus. When too many people who 
don't know the field really well are involved you get bastardized 
syntax.

The vocabulary should not be defined name by name, function by 
function. It should be, you know, an index that you can 
reference. So a set is a set, a sequence is a sequence, and array 
an array, a list a list, a linked-list a linked-list and so on.

A well designed language has a small vocabulary with not much 
overlap and expressiveness grow out of it. That way you don't 
have to memorize so much.

If you need to read the docs to deduce what goes on in a function 
then it isn't good enough. Which is why constructs with weird 
behaviour should have longer descriptive names.

In this case, you wanted a short unique name to describe weird 
behaviour. That's going to make code hard to read.