The Case Against Autodecode

[jmh530 via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 2 June 2016 at 13:06:44 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
>
> Look at reddit and hackernews, too - admittedly other 
> self-selected communities. Language debates often spring about. 
> How often is the point being made that D is wanting because of 
> its string support? Nada.

I've been lurking on this thread for a while and was convinced by 
the arguments that autodecoding should go.

Nevertheless, I think this is really the strongest argument 
you've made against using the community's resources to fix it 
now. If your position from the beginning were this clear, then I 
think the thread might not have gone on so long. As someone 
trained in economics, I get convinced by arguments about scarce 
resources. It makes more sense to focus on higher value issues.

However, the case against autodecoding is clearly popular. At a 
minimum, it has resulted in a significant amount of time 
dedicated to forum discussion and has made you metaphorically 
angry at Walter. Resources spent grumbling about it could be 
better spent elsewhere.

One way to deal with the problem of scarce resources is by 
reducing the cost of whatever action you want to take. For 
instance, Adam Ruppe just put up a good post in the Dealing with 
Autodecode thread
https://forum.dlang.org/post/ksasfwpuvpwxjfniupiv@forum.dlang.org
noting that a compiler switch could easily be added to phobos. 
Combined with a long deprecation timeline, the cost that it would 
impose on D users who are not active forum members and might want 
to complain about the issue would be relatively small.

Another problem related to scarce resources is that there is a 
division of labor in the community. People like yourself and 
Walter have fewer substitutes for your labor. It makes sense that 
the top contributors should be focusing on higher value issues 
where fewer people have the ability to contribute. I don't 
dispute that. However, there seem to be a number of people who 
can contribute on this issue and want to contribute. Scarcity of 
resources seems to be less of an issue here.

Finally, when you discussed things people complain about D, you 
mentioned tooling. In the time I've been following this forum, I 
haven't seen a single thread focusing on this issue. I don't mean 
a few comments like "oh D should improve its tooling." I mean a 
thread dedicated to D's tooling strengths and weaknesses with a 
goal of creating a plan on what to do to improve things.

>
> Currently dfix is weak because it doesn't do lookup. So we need 
> to make the front end into a library. Daniel said he wants to 
> be on it, but he has two jobs to worry about so he's short on 
> time. There's only so many hours in the day, and I think the 
> right focus is on attacking the matters above.
>

On a somewhat tangential basis, I was reading about Microsoft's 
Roslyn a week or so ago. They do something similar where they 
have a compiler API. I don't have a very good sense of how it 
works from their overview, but it seems to be an interesting 
approach.