Dealing with Autodecode

[poliklosio via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 2 June 2016 at 07:21:28 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Thursday, 2 June 2016 at 06:53:49 UTC, poliklosio wrote:
>> (...)
>
> It has been noted many times that forum users are a small part 
> of the D userbase, likely the ones who are the most interested 
> in evolving the language and thus biased towards changes.  As a 
> forum user myself, I'm in that group too and agree with Walter 
> that D programmers should be guided by Phobos to explicitly 
> declare what level of decoding they want, but this poll may not 
> be representative of the wider userbase.
>
> We'll likely only find out what they think once we're a couple 
> dmd releases into these changes, as Walter found when he 
> submitted PRs for file/path code sometime back.

Its not representative but there is going to be at least some 
weak correlation between the forum and proffesional world. We are 
developers after all. Out of 16 proffesional users none selected 
"Please, don't break my code" option, which tells that there is 
some hope that a change wouldn't be that damaging. Of course 
further investigation would be needed to confirm that hypothesis. 
But at least we didn't prove that such investigation is a waste 
of time.

Also, on the issue of wanting/not wanting autodecoding as a 
feature (ignoring the code breakage issue) 0 out of 55 people 
actually want autodecoding. I think its improbable that most 
users outside the forum would have the opposite view. You would 
have at least some of this refrected in the poll.

So the poll does tell something, you just have to know how not to 
overinterpret the results. :)