Some Observations on the D Development Process

[Walter Bright]

On 1/5/2018 7:39 AM, Seb wrote:
> We should put things like this somewhere where it can easily be seen by others.
> The obvious candidates are the Wiki and Bugzilla, but both have historically 
> proven to yield poor results, e.g.

Sigh. Bugzilla is the answer, and lots of people do troll Bugzilla looking for 
things to do. Adding another list somewhere else is not going to improve things.

What's needed (from my perspective) is more people doing quality work. Not more 
process.

Mike Franklin is a standout here. He's actually going through the files I listed 
and has already posted several PRs doing the modifications. That is what we need.

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Now, in my work highlighting error messages, I noticed that a number of them 
could be made better by relying less on compiler jargon and having a bit more 
exposition on what the problem is.

For example, there were several uses of the word 'ctor' instead of 
'constructor'. There are also uses of 'aggregate' instead of 'struct, union or 
class'.

These kind of improvements cannot be done en masse, because someone has to look 
at each specific message, the context which will generate it, and think about 
how better to express this to the user. A good message will present the context, 
what is wrong, and perhaps suggest corrective action.

Some messages are generic for a diverse collection of actual errors, and should 
be broken out into different messages for each error.

This has been done already for many messages, such as the ones where I added 
spell checking so the message could suggest what might have been meant instead, 
but there are an awful lot of messages in the compiler which are workmanlike, 
but are a bit abrupt.