The next iteration of scope

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 3/22/15 10:20 AM, "Marc =?UTF-8?B?U2Now7x0eiI=?= <schuetzm at gmx.net>" 
wrote:
> On Sunday, 15 March 2015 at 14:10:02 UTC, Marc Schütz wrote:
>> Here's the new version of my scope proposal:
>> http://wiki.dlang.org/User:Schuetzm/scope2
>>
>> It's still missing real-life examples, a section on the
>> implementation, and a more formal specification, as well as a
>> discussion of backwards compatibility. But I thought I'd show what I
>> have, so that it can be discussed early on.
>>
>> I hope it will be more digestible for Walter & Andrei. It's more or
>> less an extended version of DIP25, and avoids the need for most
>> explicit annotations.
>
> BUMP
>
> @Walter & Andrei: What is your opinion? Is it better than the last
> proposal? Worse? Good enough?

Speaking for myself (though I suspect Walter is in a similar position) 
I'm not sure when I'll have time to get to it. I'm to my head in stuff 
that's important and urgent.

I need to get DConf submissions reviewed and published. (That should 
happen later today - stay tuned!) What seems to be a trivial process for 
anyone who hasn't done it turns out to be a ton of grind.

At work I'm working on reviewing a bunch of non-idiomatic D (rather 
Java/Python/Go written in D) and refactor it into much shorter and more 
efficient idiomatic D. That is also important and urgent; with badly 
written D there's little visible advantage to D at large and a lot of 
incentive to fall back on the more familiar languages. That spills into 
documentation work, and recent discussions between Walter and me led to 
him (and thankfully others) being preoccupied with improving the 
documentation.

As odd as it sounds, better documentation for what we have is more 
"important * urgent" cross-product than exploration of language 
improvements.

Then I also need to get diverted into PR work like improving byLine. 
Something that has not really been internalized by folks here is that 
statistically EVERYBODY is on StackOverflow and NOBODY is on 
forum.dlang.org. Clearly the few folks in this forum are quite 
influential in the technical direction of the language, but the 
long-term pull (upwards or downward) of people influenced by articles 
like 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28922323/improving-line-wise-i-o-operations-in-d/29153508 
can turn things radically better (or respectively worse). On that page 
there is one relevant piece of information - the link to the PR I 
created. It has just one vote, which pretty much means that next to 
nobody in this forum bothered to muster even that level of participation.

I can't express how much relief there is that Adam's weekly newsletter 
and Martin's work on the release mean that essentially I can take such 
matters off my mind.

Above all, my main preoccupation is to convert the energy going in 
incessant conversations in this forum on a variety of topics, from 
Brownian motion into directed propelling force.

===

A good trait of a graduate student is being able to act creatively on 
little advisor input. Academic advisors at top universities are almost 
always exceptionally good in their field; incredibly troves of insight 
and information. However, they are also immensely - and proverbially - 
busy which means they have little time to dedicate to any particular 
tidbit of information. For graduate students, that means if a particular 
matter reached the consciousness level of the adviser, it should 
definitely be looked into without further prodding. I sometimes wish D's 
leadership were in that position - if there is agreement some matter is 
important, it would be naturally looked into without a need to insist on 
it or debate it at nauseam.

Your proposal? I want to look into it. I must look into it, and it's a 
requirement that I look into it in order for it to make it into D. But I 
cannot promise when for as long as I am unable to delegate even the most 
trivial matters.


Andrei