Walter and Andrei and community relationship management

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 4/6/17 1:56 PM, bachmeier wrote:
> On Thursday, 6 April 2017 at 13:55:43 UTC, Olivier FAURE wrote:
> 
>> I don't want to make any assumptions, and I do respect Walter for 
>> consistently taking on a role that means that people keep criticizing 
>> his choices whatever he does, but his approach to dealing with the 
>> community is undeniably flawed, and seems to be breeding a lot of 
>> frustration and resentment.
> 
> IMO the source of the problem is that Walter and Andrei have freedom to 
> make any language changes they want, without even consulting the 
> community, while everyone else has to put a lot of time into a formal 
> proposal with nearly a 100% chance that it will be denied because of 
> [insert your favorite reason].

We commit to be more formal about the process, but overall it is correct 
that we have more say in what gets in the language. Allow me to add a 
couple of things.

First, this is the way things are commonly done in language design - a 
small committee defines a formal process and ultimately decides on 
features. In fact it is unusual that we put up unfinished ideas up for 
discussion, which we hope has the raises the level of responsibility in 
the community. I understand how what we did has been misunderstood as us 
just considering ourselves exempt from the due process. We have a very 
strong interest to follow a formal process and have the trail serve as a 
template to follow. (That intent is visible in 
https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/blob/master/DIPs/DIP1005.md as well, with 
the unexpected twist of an interesting idea that obsoleted it. The idea 
has come from Daniel Nielsen in this forum and has been adapted with 
credit in https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/1756.)

Second, we are very much open to increasing the size of our committee. 
This is already happening - it is obvious that known strong contributors 
with a good track record and who make consistently valuable have a huge 
impact on the language and library definition. Fortunately we have quite 
a few of those. In contrast, our attention is more difficult to be 
commanded by commentators who have little history of pull requests, 
good-quality DIPs, articles etc. and attempt to strong-arm us into 
pursuing underspecified ideas.

Third, all of this is a process not an immutable status. We are learning 
leadership on the job, and although I think we have made large strides 
since only e.g. one year ago, there is much more to improve. Expect more 
changes in the future and please bear with us and grant us your 
understanding as we are getting the hang of it.


Andrei