Walter and Andrei and community relationship management

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 14 April 2017 at 21:09:23 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Fundamentally changing the language is a major undertaking. The 
> language is complicated, there's a lot of baggage, and the 
> reason things are the way they are is usually unclear. Having a 
> handwavy post proposing such things is just not good enough.
>
> It's a fact of life that 99% (made up number) of fundamental 
> language change proposals are going to fail. What an 
> intractable mess D would be if the daily stream of language 
> proposals were implemented. I have more than enough trouble 
> with regressions caused by previous language changes.

I'm not disputing that, and I would always defend your right, as 
the person with ultimate responsibility for the language, to have 
the ultimate veto.

> Nevertheless, if you peruse the PRs, a number of language 
> changes have been made by various champions. There is the way 
> import lookups are done now - a change implemented by myself 
> and Martin, but proposed by others. The way Ddoc works has been 
> altered significantly by others, such as having runnable 
> embedded example code. Kenji made many subtle changes to how 
> templates work.

Out of curiosity -- when did these things happen, and what was 
the process people went through?  It could be interesting to 
understand if these contributions were easier because they 
occurred at a time when the language definition was less well 
defined and so it was easier to champion changes.

> I read deadalnix's posts. I pointed out major unaddressed 
> issues, like how does it deal with an application using 
> multiple independent methods of allocating memory.

To be clear -- I don't want to make this about the specifics of 
Deadalnix's proposal.  I chose to use that as an example for 
discussion ... on which I'll follow up in reply to your next 
remarks:

> If you or anyone else want to self-select as the champion for 
> it to make it more complete, that's how things work. I work 
> every day trying to keep D moving - I spent yesterday updating 
> the /dmd/samples so they work again, nobody else wanted to do 
> it. I also spent much time yesterday figuring out why Windows 
> DLL support broke again. Nobody else was going to do that. I 
> simply cannot turn every idea posted here into a detailed 
> proposal.
>
> Keep in mind that other languages, such as C++, will not even 
> look at any proposals that are not detailed and complete. And 
> that's just the start of a pretty brutal winnowing process. 
> Their position is that if the proponent of a change is not 
> willing to put in the work to make a detailed proposal, why 
> should it be worth their time to investigate it? It can't work 
> any other way.

I agree that, broadly, this is how things need to work, and I'm 
not suggesting that it should be your responsibility to take 
other people's skeleton ideas and flesh them out.  But note that 
C++'s process is possible at least partly because there is such a 
scale of people involved, that probably (i) they _have_ to 
operate this brutally just in order to get the number of 
proposals down to a manageable scale, and (ii) there's always 
going to be another person willing to pick up a good idea, if the 
original proponent drops out.

What I'm suggesting (and I won't repeat myself from my post above 
<https://forum.dlang.org/post/cwoezrgcspdoibmrwkuc@forum.dlang.org>) is not that you load yourself with even more work, but just to consider some specific short-term measures to try to raise the level of confidence people have in engaging with process.

I.e. invest in changing people's perceptions of process now, to 
drive much more productive engagement with process in future.